II. “THE NIGHT OF THE PAPACY”--CHARLEMAGNE TO OTTO THE GREAT…

II. “THE NIGHT OF THE PAPACY”--CHARLEMAGNE TO OTTO THE GREAT

[Sidenote: [740-985 A.D.]]

From the East, powerless to render help, from an empire crumbling away beneath the weight of its own greatness, Gregory III therefore turned away, and fixed his gaze on the youthful greatness of a transalpine nation--the Franks--brave, adventurous, full of promise, successful in warfare, and destined to rise to future power. With Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, and virtual ruler of the Frankish realm, Gregory II had already opened communications. To Charles Martel, his successor Gregory III again appealed, when, after eight years of doubtful peace, he suddenly found himself involved in an open war with the Lombards. His appeal is truly touching: “His tears are falling night and day for the destitute state of the church; the Lombard king and his son are ravaging the last remains of the property of the church, which no longer suffices for the sustenance of the poor, or to provide lights for the daily service; they have invaded the territory of Rome and seized all his farms; his only hope is in the timely succour of the Frankish king.” The appeal was rendered still stronger by the presents that accompanied it--the mystic keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter, and filings of his chains, which no Christian could resist. The title of patrician and consul of Rome was offered; and Gregory, as might be expected after such presents, received a courteous answer and an embassy was despatched to the imperial city.

[Sidenote: [741-754 A.D.]]

It is impossible to say what might have been the result of the negotiations between the pope and the ambassadors had they been continued. They were, however, interrupted by the death of both the potentates; of Charles Martel in October, of Gregory III in November of the very same year. Nevertheless these negotiations were the prelude to subsequent negotiations which Pepin le Bref, the son of Charles Martel, carried on with Pope Zacharias (Zachary), the successor of Gregory III; and this time the negotiations led to most important results.

INDEPENDENCE OF THE ROMAN BISHOPS

At the election of Zacharias, the customary form of obtaining the consent of the exarch was discarded, and discarded to be never afterwards revived. Henceforth the popes may be considered as independent of the Eastern Empire; henceforth begins their connection with the West; henceforth they hold no longer an exclusive ecclesiastical position, but the papacy has become a political dukedom. After the Sixth General Council, they had claimed the title of “universal priest,” and vindicated that claim by soon afterwards reducing to submission the last of the great archbishops of the West. After the appeal to Charles Martel and the independent election of Zacharias, they aspired to political sovereignty.[b]

THE APPEAL TO THE FRANKS

Zacharias, convinced of the advantage which Rome might derive from intimate union with the rising power of the Franks, watched with careful attention over the interests of the mayors of the palace; and it was at his suggestion that the nation at length conferred on those powerful functionaries the titles as well as the privileges of royalty. The Lombard princes regarded him with corresponding reverence. Liutprand, whose reign lasted above thirty years, was distinguished for his devout observance of the maxims of the church. The charity of the pontiff was equal to his talents, and the slaves which Venice offered to the Moors were purchased by his agents and set free.

Stephen II,[91] who next occupied the pontifical chair, had to endure, from the very commencement of his career, the troubles and dangers of domestic wars. Aistulf, the new king of the Lombards, inherited the spirit of his earliest predecessors, and it only required the appearance of a leader like Aistulf to put an end forever to the rule of the Greeks in Italy. But the Lombard monarch was not contented with the acquisition of Ravenna. He assailed the duchy of Rome and the lands of the church, nor could Stephen, either by the most solemn expostulations, or the offers which he made of money, induce the conqueror to withdraw his troops. In this situation, and when the Lombards had demanded as the price of their safety a tribute which the citizens of Rome felt it would be impossible to pay, the pontiff sent messengers to Constantinople requesting aid of the emperor; but his entreaties were disregarded. He turned his eyes towards France, where Pepin, the father of the heroic Charlemagne, was now at the head of a nation as warlike as the Lombards, and as disposed to ally itself with Rome as the invaders were to effect its ruin.

[Sidenote: [754-755 A.D.]]

Ambassadors were sent to Rome to treat with the Lombards for Stephen’s safe passage into France, a negotiation which could scarcely fail in the hands of the powerful sovereign by whom it was undertaken. The pontiff was speedily on his way to the new protector of the church. He appeared with all his attendants before the monarch, clad in sackcloth and ashes, and falling at his knees he implored him, by the mercy of God and the merits of St. Peter and St. Paul, to deliver Rome from the devastation of the Lombards. Pepin in reply promised to grant the pontiff’s request, and speedily fulfilled his promise by compelling the enemy to retreat and shut himself up in the single town of Pavia. Aistulf, thus pressed, agreed to the terms proposed by his conqueror, and the French army was withdrawn. But scarcely had they left the district when he returned to the attack with renewed vigour, laid waste the country round Rome with fire and sword, and at length encamped before the gates of the city itself. The pontiff again sent a strong appeal to his protector. He dictated his letter in the name of the apostle Peter, closely imitating his epistles, and speaking in a language which implied that he was possessed of an authority to anoint or dethrone kings, and to perform the offices, not of a messenger, of a teacher sent from God, which is the highest characteristic of an apostle, but of a delegated minister of his power and justice.

The French monarch was moved to render the pontiff immediate succour, and Aistulf was quickly deprived of the fruits of his numerous campaigns. It now became a question to whom the district from which the Lombard was driven ought of right to belong; and, before this point could be decided, the envoy of the Greek emperor appeared, to claim for his master the restoration of the territory which he had so completely abandoned to its fate. But Pepin was both too politic and too conscious of his power to listen to such demands; and sending his chief counsellor, the abbot Fulrade (Folrad), to perform the investiture, he granted to Stephen, and to his successors forever, the undivided sovereignty of the conquered territory.

Thus commenced the temporal dominion of the bishops of Rome--an event which marks a distinct period in the history of the papacy, but the importance of which we cannot but think has been somewhat overrated. The power by which the pontiffs acquired their vast empire in the minds of men, owed little or none of its vigour to the influence they possessed as princes; it went on increasing till it reached the very boundaries of civilisation, while their little seigniory remained confined within the narrowest limits; and it declined, and became almost nominal, while their rights as sovereigns continued to be acknowledged by all the states of Europe. In point of wealth it plainly admits of being questioned whether they could gain any advantage from an acquisition which obliged them to keep an army in their pay; to support a countless train of emissaries and envoys; and to engage in all the expensive arts of diplomacy with the monarchs of countries whose treasures were perpetually supplied by the labours and the commerce of their people.

As little was their new dominion advantageous to their dignity. The pontiff was the first among the spiritual rulers of mankind, the lowest almost of temporal princes. As the head of the church, he was rendered venerable by all the associations and by many of the highest sanctions of religion; as the successor of the exarchs of Ravenna, he was the dependent of every prince who had an army at his command, and was but an item in the catalogue of petty rulers, who were counted as make-weights in the balance of power. In whatever designs he undertook as the supremely endowed minister of God, he could appeal to the hearts and consciences of men; could shake the confidence of the mightiest, and bring into alliance the most contrary elements of society to effect his purpose; whatever attempts he had to make in his temporal capacity required to be supported by the pettiest inventions of secret policy, by contrivances and deceits which, in time, rendered the proceedings of the court of Rome proverbial as examples of cunning and duplicity.

[Sidenote: [755-775 A.D.]]

Stephen died, after a short but eventful pontificate of five years, and was succeeded by his brother Paul (756 A.D.). The Greeks still continued to proclaim their pretensions to the sovereignty of Italy; nor dared the Roman pontiff, vain as were their claims, at once throw off the appearance of allegiance. The Lombards, on the other hand, showed themselves little inclined to preserve the treaty which had been formed with the church. A tumult, equally dangerous to the state and to the respectability of the pontificate, followed the death of Paul. Totona, a nobleman of wealth and influence, formed the design of elevating his brother Constantine to the vacant chair, and Constantine kept possession of his usurped authority nearly a year. A strong effort was then made by the great body of the clergy and the people to recover their invaded right of election. The pontiff was seized, and deprived of his eyes. A new pope ascended the throne.

Stephen III enjoyed his honours about four years, and then left them to be possessed by Adrian I. The Lombards still pressed close upon the boundaries of Rome. It was at this period, moreover, that the controversy with the iconoclasts approached its highest degree of virulence; and Adrian had to employ all the prudence of which he was master to meet the dangers in which it involved him. The measures pursued by the empress Irene were as unfavourable to his views as they were in themselves violent and unjust. The iconoclasts were as odious to him as to her; they were as opposed to the system which it was his object to establish, as they were to her usurpations and tyranny. While he expressed his doubts, therefore, as to the propriety of the new patriarch’s consecration, and showed considerable backwardness in recognising the Second Council of Nicæa, he attempted no vigorous resistance to the invasion of those rules which were violated in her proceedings. The establishment of image-worship promised effects more favourable to his general interests than the assumption of authority by Tiresias, and his patroness was offensive to his immediate feelings. But the church was now to receive the support of a prince whose character and circumstances were equally calculated to mark him for her champion.[c]

CHARLEMAGNE AND THE POPE

[Sidenote: [775-776 A.D.]]

Einhard[l] (Eginhard), the biographer of Charlemagne, informs us that the strictest friendship subsisted between that monarch and Pope Adrian I. In the still extant correspondence between them, we find the freest communication of opinion and feeling both upon political and ecclesiastical affairs. In exact conformity with the policy of his predecessors, Adrian regarded the Frankish monarch as the covenanted protector of the holy see and its possessions, and in that capacity bound to recover for her every debt the pope might see fit to claim as her “righteous due.” Thus when Leo, archbishop of Ravenna, refused to relinquish his metropolitan rights over certain districts alleged to form part of the donation of Charlemagne, the pope expressed his anxiety for the presence and support of his friend and protector. Adrian, moreover, suspected the royal missi, or commissioners, of collusion with the vassal dukes of Benevento and Spoleto, to the injury of the holy see; and, whether from authentic information or with a view to alarm his correspondent for the safety of his Italian conquests, he magnified the transactions complained of into a criminal conspiracy against the crown. He told the king that the outbreak was actually fixed to take place in the month of March then next following (776 A.D.); that Adelchis (Adalgis), the son of Desiderius, the captive king of the Lombards, was to appear on the coast with a Greek fleet; that Rome was to be assailed both by sea and land, the churches were to be plundered, the pope was to be carried into captivity, and the Lombard dynasty to be reinstated.

Other motives were not wanting to induce Charlemagne to pay a second military visit to his newly acquired dominions in Italy. It had become necessary to take immediate steps for the dissolution of a long-suspected plot between his disaffected subject, Duke Tassilo of Bavaria, and the partisans of the late dynasty. In the winter, therefore, of the year 776, he crossed the Alps at the head of a numerous army; the duke of Friuli, who appears to have taken a principal part in the conspiracy, was expelled from his duchy; and in a short time the presence of the conqueror appears to have dispelled all apprehensions of further danger either to church or state. The pope professed himself satisfied with the result, and returned thanks for the protection afforded with great apparent warmth and cordiality.

THE DONATION FROM CONSTANTINE

[Sidenote: [776-780 A.D.]]

Yet all had not, it seems, been done for the satisfaction of the papal claims. Another and a different title to an almost imperial power is brought to light. Now, for the first time after the lapse of four centuries and a half, it is discovered that all which Pepin or Charlemagne had conferred on the church of Rome was an insignificant instalment of that more extensive dominion originally granted to the chair of Peter by “the pious emperor Constantine.”

The expressions used by the pope to denote the extent of this supposed donation are not free from uncertainty and ambiguity. The endowment of “supreme power over all the region of the West,” alleged to have been granted by Constantine the Great, must have comprehended much more than the territories conveyed by the deeds of Pepin and Charlemagne. It is therefore insinuated that, though those princes had dealt liberally by the church, they would, notwithstanding, not have done their whole duty until they should have given possession of all that had been comprised in the original deed of gift. Charlemagne, it seems, was to consider himself as the mere executor of his predecessor Constantine the Great; and in that character it is obvious he must stand in a position of far less observance than as the spontaneous patron and benefactor.

The fictitious donation was presented to him as absolute in its terms; therefore as at once discharging the estate conveyed in the execution of its provisions from all dues, duties, and conditions whatsoever, claimable by the hand through which it passed to the rightful owner. It was significantly hinted that his past services were held by the pope to merge in his obligations for the future; that he should think less of the benefits he had conferred than of the duties he might rightfully be called upon to perform; and that, as long as a single item of the infinite debt entailed upon him by his great testator remained unpaid, he must consider himself as debtor to God and St. Peter for the whole.

It would be hardly fair to presume that the impudent forgery, afterwards known by the title of the Donation of Constantine, had as yet found its appropriate niche in the archives of the Lateran, or that it was included among the documents which the pope instructed his envoys to produce to Charlemagne. But among the multitude of eager searchers, the thing wanted is generally near enough at hand for the purposes of the less scrupulous among the number. In the reign of Pope Adrian I the desire for territorial acquisition had been stimulated by success to a degree of intensity scarcely paralleled in the history of secular ambition. In such a disposition, a feather-light tradition might stand as good ground for the most extravagant claims; and the fabrication of the outward proof of what was already registered in men’s minds as accredited fact, might appear as a mere venial condescension to the natural adhesion of mankind to the usual and customary modes of proof.

The transient visit of Charlemagne to Italy in the year 776 appears for the moment to have dissipated the apprehensions of the pope. Four years later an interval of peace on his Saxon frontier and the temporary submission of his turbulent vassal Tassilo of Bavaria left Charlemagne at leisure to disentangle by his presence the ravelled state of Italian affairs. He was probably anxious to acquaint himself personally with the causes of the existing disorders, as well as to obtain an explanation of the interruption in the harmony of his correspondence with the pope, whom he sincerely honoured and was well disposed to support. The critical state, however, of the coasts and frontiers, as depicted to him by Adrian, appears to have made no serious impression. No military preparations were thought necessary; and in the winter of the year 780, Charlemagne, accompanied by his consort Hildegard, his two infant sons Carloman and Louis, and escorted by no other force than his ordinary household troops and followers, crossed the Alps into Italy. The annalists of the age describe the expedition as a visit of devotion.

CHARLEMAGNE’S THIRD AND FOURTH ENTRANCES INTO ITALY

[Sidenote: [780-786 A.D.]]

In the spring of the year 781 Charlemagne arrived for the third time in Rome, where he celebrated the great festival of Easter. Pope Adrian upon this occasion conferred the right of baptism on the two young princes, changing the name of the elder from that of Carloman to Pepin, in honour of his grandfather; and at the same moment he crowned the elder “king of the Lombards,” and the younger (Louis) king of Aquitaine. The honour was accepted, probably solicited, by the king without any misgiving as to the inferences that might thereafter be drawn from this or past condescendencies of the like character. Charlemagne never scrupled to make use of church or pontiff for the accomplishment of his political purposes; and he now called upon Adrian to support the remonstrances he thought it necessary to address to his nephew Tassilo by the aid of his spiritual authority.

Charlemagne could not but acknowledge that he had been greatly indebted to the exertions of the churchmen for the pacification of his Saxon acquisitions; and in requital of this co-operation he was not inclined to deny to his spiritual allies an important share in the profits of victory. But the consciousness of present power shut out any sinister view to the future. The church was, after all, in his hands no more than an instrument for the accomplishment of his purposes; that she should ever become his mistress was remote from his contemplation; and it is not to be wondered at that he should have identified her interests with those of his government in that spirit of gratitude which might in the sequel be made to wear an aspect of homage very conducive to the progress of hierarchical pretension.

Both parties were in the main inclined to regard each other as the means and instruments for the promotion of their separate interests. But the absence of any real reciprocity in the terms of compact could not but very soon become apparent. No temporal benefit could be conferred by the pope commensurate with the sacrifices the monarch was incessantly called upon to make to the insatiate craving of the holy see for those substantial augmentations, that costly support, that burdensome protection, to which he was held to have pledged himself. Such an understanding could last no longer than while either or both parties were actuated rather by religious than by merely selfish motives. The views of Pope Adrian had nothing of a properly religious character in them; his correspondence is but an echo of the one shrill cry for “more.” “Give, grant, endow, restore, and the blessed Peter shall surely send you victory and prosperity.” This is the burden of the papal addresses from the birth to the consummation of the alliance. A certain coincidence of interests, supported upon the religious and loyal character of Charlemagne, had hitherto cemented the union; but, though the result might be overlooked, it is clear that as soon as those interests should diverge or cease to exist, there remained nothing behind to prevent them from falling into irreconcilable opposition. Even within this period of apparent concord and cordiality some symptoms of such a divergency may be detected.

[Sidenote: [786-795 A.D.]]

In the year 786 Charlemagne paid a fourth visit to Rome; and after performing the customary devotional exercises at the principal shrines and churches, he applied himself to the task of reducing the refractory duke of Benevento to obedience. An accommodation was easily accomplished; Charlemagne accepted the renewed oaths of allegiance of the duke and his vassals, and carried away with him Grimwald (Grimoald), the second son of Arichis (Arighis), as a pledge for the future obedience of the duke and his subjects. No notice was taken of the papal claim upon the territory of Benevento; and Pope Adrian once more saw his royal patron depart without obtaining the object nearest to his heart. During the remainder of his pontificate we trace no further attempt on the part of the pope to realise his favourite project of aggrandisement. The momentary coolness which had followed the defeat of the Calabrian Greeks produced no real estrangement between him and his great patron; and Adrian died (795) in the full enjoyment of the confidence and esteem of Charlemagne.

THE REALM OF THE POPES

At the close of the reign of Charlemagne the possessions of the church of Rome may thus be identified with existing geographical divisions: (1) In virtue of right, or pretension of right, originating prior to the donation of Pepin, the pontiffs exercised temporal jurisdiction over the city and duchy of Rome as it had existed under the Byzantine supremacy, comprehending, as nearly as may now be ascertained, the modern district emphatically known by the name of the “Patrimony Proper,” together with the greatest portion if not the whole of the Campagna di Roma as far south as Terracina. (2) By the donations of Pepin and Charlemagne the church of Rome had reduced into possession the city and exarchate of Ravenna, comprising the modern legations of Bologna, Romagna, Urbino, and Ferrara, with the duchies of Parma and Modena and a portion of the Venetian terra-firma on the mouths of the Po.

But these extensive tracts of country were regarded by the popes as but a portion of their claim under the treaties of Pontyon and Quierzy and the donation of Charlemagne. That claim extended over the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, the entire duchies of Benevento and Spoleto, and all the remaining dependencies of the Byzantines in southern Italy, including both Calabrias and the adjacent island of Sicily; thus constituting in the aggregate nearly the whole of Italy south of the river Po, ranging thence along the eastern declivity of the Apennines as far as the southernmost confine of the modern grand duchy of Tuscany, and thence expanding over the breadth of the peninsula to the extreme coasts, embracing all the greater adjoining islands and the territory of Istria on the northeastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Pope Adrian I died on the 26th of December in the year 795, after the unusually long pontificate of twenty-three years and upwards. When Charlemagne heard of his demise, we are told that he wept for him as for a brother.

[Sidenote: [795-800 A.D.]]

On the occasion of Charlemagne’s first visit to Rome (774), Pope Adrian conferred upon him the title and dignity of patrician, or official advocate and protector of the holy see. When shortly after the death of that pontiff in the year 795, Leo, archpriest of the church of St. Susanna, was elected to the vacant chair by the title of Leo III, the new pope hastened to renew the patent of the patriciate, as if it were an office expiring with the life of the grantor. As matters stood at this moment between him and the king, it is safest to conclude that the pope desired that the royal patrician should regard himself as captain-general of the church, and that he should in that capacity be entitled to the military services of its subjects, when called on by the church to interfere for the protection of her temporal rights. But the act of Pope Leo III, which placed his subjects under military obligation to a stranger, was calculated to engender grave misunderstandings. The feudal principle, now rapidly unfolding itself in the European polity, drew no distinction between civil and military subjection; and the oath of the Romans to the protector might be easily confounded with that of subject to sovereign.

The constitutional or political powers exercised at this period by the pontiffs within the city and territory of the church are very obscurely indicated in the documents of the age. From what we discern on the surface of history, no very well-defined relation subsisted between the so-called “republic of Rome” and the spiritual ruler. The bond which connected them, as far as, at this distance of time and with such defective information, we can discern, was the recognised participation of the richer and more powerful families in all the offices of government and the dignities and emoluments of ecclesiastical promotion. But by such an arrangement it is obvious that every just limit between spiritual and temporal interests must be speedily obliterated; the result was verified in the unutterable corruptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Even at this point of time, and for a long series of years past, many symptoms of a vicious and demoralising relation between the constituents of the Roman state are apparent.

In the fifth year of the pontificate of Leo III two relatives of Pope Adrian I, Paschal the primicerius and Campulus the sacellarius of the holy see, conspired to depose the reigning pontiff. After suffering some personal injuries at the hands of his rebellious subjects, Leo was expelled from the city; and he resolved to solicit redress in person at the court of Charlemagne, who was at that moment sojourning at Paderborn, within the confines of the vanquished Saxons. The king received the suppliant pontiff with the highest honours, and listened to his complaints with the profoundest attention. Of the special subjects of the conference we are not informed; but in the autumn of the year 799 Leo returned to Rome under an escort sufficiently strong to insure his personal safety. In the interim, the faction opposed to him had lost ground, and he was received by the citizens with unusual tokens of joy and affection.

Pope Leo was, as it appears, accompanied to Rome by two German prelates, Hildebrand archbishop of Cologne, and Arno archbishop of Salzburg, as missi dominici, or royal commissioners, charged to make due inquisition into the offences imputed to the pope by his adversaries. The prelates are said to have examined the evidence on both sides with great care and minuteness, and at the close of it to have come to the conclusion that nothing criminal had been established against the pope; upon which decision his rebellious accusers were taken into custody and carried away to France.

THE TRIAL OF THE POPE AND THE CROWNING OF CHARLEMAGNE

[Sidenote: [800 A.D.]]

Within the twelvemonth of the reinstatement of the pope, Charlemagne held a great diet of the realm at Mainz. “There,” says the annalist,[m] “he assembled his great nobles, his bishops, and his abbots all; and having reported to them that there was now peace in all his borders, he called to their minds the evils which the Romans had done to the apostolic Leo; and he set his face to go into the parts of Rome, and thither he accordingly proceeded.” This simple notice of the annalist of Moissac is the only passage in any original chronicle in which a motive for this fifth expedition of Charlemagne to Rome is assigned. The king arrived at the gates of the city on the 24th of November, 800, and was received by the pontiff under the porch of St. Peter’s church, outside the walls, with all due devotion and honour. Seven days afterwards a solemn assembly of the citizens was convoked, at which the king acquainted them with the cause of his visit.

His next proceeding is not very intelligible. He assembled, we are told, a solemn synod, still in the basilica of St. Peter, to inquire into the crimes imputed to the pope; but whether the old or fresh inculpations is not said. On this occasion the king and the pope sat beside each other, surrounded by the nobility, the bishops, and the abbots of France and Italy. The spiritual lords alone were seated; the inferior priests and the laity of all ranks remained standing. Proclamation was then made for the accusers to come forward and make their complaint; but no one answered to the call. It is not apparent why this formality should have been observed at all, inasmuch as the clergy had unanimously declared themselves incompetent to sit in judgment upon a pontiff of the holy see. The pope, however, intimated his intention to purge himself of all the offences laid to his charge in the form established in like cases by his predecessors. On the following day, therefore, he in full synod took the books of the Gospels in his hands, and upon them he solemnly protested his innocence; whereupon “the prelates and all the clergy burst simultaneously into a hymn of thanksgiving, devoutly praising God, the holy Virgin, St. Peter, and all the saints.”

Within the first month of the residence of Charlemagne in Rome nothing took place indicative of any ulterior purpose. During all that time the king had appeared to be absorbed in regulating the political affairs of the church and city. But on Christmas Day of the year 800, while he and the pope devoutly knelt together at the altar of St. Peter’s church, engaged in the preliminary prayer before mass, the pontiff, as if moved by a sudden impulse of inspiration, placed upon his head an elaborately wrought and very costly imperial crown. At the same time the people, as if prepared for the incident, simultaneously and as with one voice exclaimed, “Long life to Charles, augustus, the great and peace-giving emperor of the Romans, whom the hand of God hath crowned!” The salutation was twice repeated; after which, according to imperial custom, he was enthroned and anointed with holy oil, and worshipped by the pope. “Whereby,” says the annalist,[m] “he was unanimously constituted emperor; and dropping the title of patrician, he was thenceforth called ‘imperator augustus.’”

Whether the crown was placed on his head with or without his consent, the mode of conferring it was intended to imply that the king was a passive party, that he accepted it as a boon or gift at the hands of the pope without claim or pretence of right on his own part. The material crown itself was of papal procurement and fabrication; the act of coronation was that of the pontiff; he gave the crown, the Roman people ratified the act and proclaimed the emperor. The transaction bears the character of a joint act, in which Leo and the Romans performed the part of spontaneous electors and sovereign depositaries of imperial power. The adoration was a simple ceremony of recognition; it was unaccompanied with any new oath of allegiance; the rights of the new emperor still resting upon the oath of obedience to him as patrician. Ultimately the participation of the people was no doubt considered as wholly accessory to the papal decision; and the pope might well hold himself out to the world as the sole depositary and dispenser of imperial authority. Upon this ground, indeed, the papacy cast anchor, and for all future ages held on with amazing pertinacity and success.

[Sidenote: [800-824 A.D.]]

On the other hand, Charlemagne and his subjects did not concern themselves with any curious inquiry into the origin of the powers which the imperial crown brought along with it. Yet, in conformity with their general notion of government, they believed that Rome and her pontiff had taken upon them the relation of subjects to the emperor whom they had crowned and anointed. It is certain that Charlemagne regarded himself as the sovereign of Rome, if not of the pope; he was emperor in his own right as fully as if he had placed the crown upon his own head. In conformity with the opinion and practice of his age, he grounded that right upon possession. In the mind of the warrior there was no place for any other derivation of title; and Charlemagne and his successors took as little distinction between the possession and the sovereignty of Rome and its appurtenant territories as they did in the case of his newly acquired dominions in Germany, Lombardy, or Spain.

A few days after the coronation of Charlemagne, he directed the persons implicated in the plot of the preceding year against the life and government of the pope to be brought before him for judgment; and, as supreme judge, he condemned them to the death of traitors. This exercise of supreme criminal judicature indicates at least the assumption of a power understood in that age to be a distinguishing attribute of sovereign authority. The condemned criminals were indeed respited at the intercession of the pope, and their punishment was commuted for exile; but nothing occurred to indicate any jealous feeling on the part of the pontiff; and throughout the winter of the year 801 Charlemagne continued to exercise every prerogative of imperial power in Rome with as free a hand as when he set up his migratory throne upon the banks of the Seine, the Rhine, or the Elbe.

In the year 806 he executed a provisional settlement of the succession to his vast dominions among his then surviving sons. During the whole course of his life Charlemagne was anxious to invest his more important acts with the sanction of religion. The settlement of 806, though provisional only, was solemnly enacted and sworn to by his sons and the estates of the realm assembled in diet at Thionville; and was soon afterwards sent by the hand of the emperor’s secretary to Rome for the approval and signature of the pope--a step which lay open to a construction probably far beyond the intent of Charlemagne.[d]

PAPAL AMBITION AFTER CHARLEMAGNE

Almost immediately after Charlemagne’s death, Leo assumed to himself a degree of authority which could not be exercised without equal injury to the state and to the sacerdotal character. Stephen IV, his successor, took the oath of allegiance, together with the whole of the people, as soon as he ascended the pontifical throne; and announced to the monarch, Louis the Pious, that he would attend him at whatever place he should appoint. But the Christian meekness of the pontiff was exceeded by that of the sovereign, who, on receiving his visit at Rheims, prostrated himself three times at his feet. There is evidence, however, to prove that it still required a man of equally powerful and ambitious mind to take full advantage of the means of aggrandisement afforded by the present position of the church. During the short reigns of several successive popes, we see the power of the emperor distinctly at work, and his right acknowledged, in the management of ecclesiastical affairs.

[Sidenote: [824-847 A.D.]]

In the year 824, and under the pontificate of Eugenius I, Louis sent his son Lothair to Rome, to inquire into the truth of the complaints made by the citizens against their sacerdotal chiefs; and when Gregory IV visited France, for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation between Louis and his son, the bishops of France, whom he appears to have threatened with his censures, proudly dared him to a trial of his power, by informing him that if he did aught against the canons, he should himself be excommunicated or deposed. The pernicious counsel of one of his advisers taught him to answer this intimation by fresh assertions of authority, and he dared to commence the practice, which subsequently proved such a fruitful source of disorder and scandal in Christendom, of declaring the sovereign deposed because of his quarrel with the ruler of the Roman church. The emperor Lothair was sufficiently tenacious of his authority to issue especial orders, on the election of Sergius II without his being consulted, that for the future no candidate for the papal throne should be consecrated till he had given his assent to the election.

In the midst of these events, the victorious Saracens were pursuing their conquests over the most fertile provinces of Europe, Asia, and Africa. While Calabria was overrun by one division of the Saracens, Rome itself was threatened by another. In vain did the terrified Romans look to the descendants of Charlemagne for help; in vain did they proffer again their broken allegiance to the emperor of the East. Neither the one nor the other was in a condition to render the required assistance, and the city appeared doomed to destruction. The venerable churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, which inspired a feeling of devotion by their antiquity, and of wonder by the magnificence of their shrines, were situated a short distance from the walls; and the unfortunate citizens witnessed from the ramparts the spoliation of these, the most sacred of their temples, without the means of making a single effort for their defence. But the rage produced by this spectacle, combined with the terror with which the entrance of the enemy into the city was contemplated, roused them to attempt some measure of resistance. The death of Sergius just at this juncture greatly contributed to promote their success. In electing Leo IV to the vacant office, they provided themselves with a skilful counsellor and an energetic leader. The invader, after various assaults, was obliged to retreat, in order to make the conquest of places less skilfully defended.

The death of Leo was succeeded by much confusion, and in this period of excitement and difficulty, the vacant chair was said to have been ascended by a woman, the celebrated papess Joan.[c]

THE MYTH OF THE WOMAN POPE

[Sidenote: [847-855 A.D.]]

Joan was the name given to a female pope, now regarded as a fictitious personage, who under the title of John VII or VIII was said, according to the most general accounts, to have occupied the papal chair between the pontificate of Leo IV and Benedict III, although various other dates are given. Tradition represents her as of English descent, but born in Ingelheim or Mainz. By some her original name is given as Gilberta, by others as Agnes. She was credited with having fallen in love with a young Benedictine monk, and with having on that account assumed the male monastic habit and lived for some time in the monastery of Fulda. Her lover, it is affirmed, died while they were pursuing their studies together at Athens, and after his death she went to Rome, where, according to the most approved version of the story, she became a very successful professor. So high indeed became her reputation for piety and learning that the cardinals with one consent elected the supposed young monk the successor of Pope Leo IV. In this position she comported herself so as to entirely justify their choice, until the catastrophe of giving birth to a male child during a procession to the Lateran palace suddenly and irrevocably blasted her reputation. She is said to have died in childbirth or to have been stoned to death.

The story of the pontificate of Joan was received as fact from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, but it has been discredited by later researches. The circumstantial evidence around which it clung, and which may have aided in suggesting it, was the observance of a circuit by the papal processions so as to avoid passing through a certain street (a statue at one time standing in that street, said to represent a woman and child, with a monumental stone near it having a peculiar inscription), and the use of a pierced seat at the enthronement of the popes. Of these facts other and more credible explanations have, however, been given, although there is no sufficient evidence to demonstrate beyond dispute the manner in which the story originated. According to Dr. Döllinger,[e] the tradition finds no support in the original text either of Marianus Scotus,[n] Sigebert of Gemblours,[o] or Otto of Freysing.[p] She is first mentioned by Stephen de Bourbon,[q] who died in 1261, and who took his information probably from the chronicle of the Dominican Jean de Mailly, no copy of which is now known to be in existence. The story is not found in any of the original manuscripts of Martinus Polus,[r] and according to Döllinger was interpolated in that chronicle some time between 1278 and 1312. He attributes the propagation of the myth chiefly to its insertion in Martinus Polus, from which it was copied into the Flores Temporum, a chronicle founded on Martinus, and its real originators he supposes to have been the Dominicans and Minorites, who had a grudge against the papacy on account of the persecutions they were experiencing at the hands of Benedict VIII. So rapidly did the tradition spread that in 1400 a bust of the papess was placed in the cathedral of Siena along with other popes, having the inscription, “John VIII, a woman from England.” The statue occupied this position till the beginning of the seventeenth century.[f]

[Sidenote: [847-867 A.D.]]

The eight years of Leo’s papacy were chiefly occupied in strengthening, in restoring the plundered and desecrated churches of the two apostles, and adorning Rome. The succession to Leo IV was contested between Benedict III, who commanded the suffrages of the clergy and people, and Anastasius, who, at the head of an armed faction, seized the Lateran, stripped Benedict of his pontifical robes, and awaited the confirmation of his violent usurpation by the imperial legates, whose influence he thought that he had secured. But these commissioners, after strict investigation, decided in favour of Benedict. Anastasius was expelled with disgrace from the Lateran, his rival consecrated in the presence of the emperor’s representatives. Anastasius, with unwonted mercy, was only degraded to lay communion. The pontificate of Benedict III is memorable chiefly for the commencement of the long strife between Ignatius and Photius for the see of Constantinople. This strife ended in the permanent schism between the Eastern and Western churches.

Nicholas I, the successor of Benedict, was chosen rather by the favour of the emperor Louis and his nobles than that of the clergy (858). He has been thought worthy to share the appellation of the Great with Leo I, with Gregory I, with Hildebrand, and with Innocent III. At least three great events signalised the pontificate of Nicholas I--the strife of Photius with Ignatius for the archiepiscopal throne of Constantinople; the prohibition of the divorce of King Lothair from his queen Theutberga; and the humiliation of the great prelates on the Rhine, the successful assertion of the papal supremacy even over Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims. In the first two of these momentous questions, the contest about the see of Constantinople, and that of Lothair, king of Lorraine, with his wife Theutberga, Nicholas took his stand on the great eternal principles of justice, humanity, and sound morals. These were no questions of abstruse and subtle theology nor the assertion of dubious rights. In both cases the pope was the protector of the feeble and the oppressed, the victims of calumny and of cruelty. The bishop of Constantinople, unjustly deposed, persecuted, exiled, treated with the worst inhumanity, implored the judgment of the head of western Christendom. A queen, not only deserted by a weak and cruel husband, but wickedly and falsely criminated by a council of bishops, obtained a hearing at the court of Rome; her innocence was vindicated, her accusers punished, the king himself compelled to bow before the majesty of justice, made more venerable by religion. If in both cases the language of Nicholas was haughty and imperious, it was justified to the ears of men by the goodness of his cause. The lofty supremacy which he asserted over the see of Byzantium awoke no jealousy, being exerted in behalf of a blameless and injured prelate. If he treated the royal dignity of France with contempt, it had already become contemptible in the eyes of mankind; if he annulled by his own authority the decree of a national council, composed of the most distinguished prelates of Gaul, that council had already been condemned by all who had natural sympathies with justice and with innocence. Yet, though in both cases Nicholas displayed equal ability and resolution in the cause of right, the event of the two affairs was very different. The dispute concerning the patriarchate of Constantinople ended in the estrangement, the alienation, the final schism between the East and West. It was the last time that the pope was permitted authoritatively to interfere in the ecclesiastical affairs of the East. The excommunication of the Greek by the Latin church was the final act of separation. In the West Nicholas established a precedent for control even over the private morals of princes. The vices of kings, especially those of France, became the stronghold of papal influence; injured queens and subjects knew to what quarter they might recur for justice or for revenge. And on this occasion the pope brought not only the impotent king, but the powerful clergy of Lorraine, beneath his feet. The great bishops of Cologne and of Trèves were reduced to abject humiliation.

RIVALRY OF NICHOLAS AND PHOTIUS

[Sidenote: [860-867 A.D.]]

The contention for the patriarchate of Constantinople was, strictly speaking, no religious controversy--it was the result of political intrigue and personal animosity. Ignatius, who became the patriarch, was of imperial descent. In the revolution which dethroned his father, Michael Rhangabé, he had taken refuge, under the cowl of a monk, from the jealousy of Leo the Armenian. Photius was chosen as his successor. Rival councils met, and the two patriarchs were alternately excommunicated by the adverse spiritual factions.

Photius was the first to determine on an appeal to Rome. The pope, he thought, would hardly resist the acknowledgment of his superiority, with the tempting promise of the total extirpation of the hated iconoclasts. Not merely did the pope address two lofty and condemnatory letters to the emperor and to Photius, but a third also to “the faithful in the East,” at the close of which he made known to the three Eastern patriarchs his steadfast resolution to maintain the cause of Ignatius, to refuse the recognition of the usurper Photius. The restoration of Ignatius was commanded even in more imperious language, and under more awful sanctions. “We, by the power committed to us by our Lord through St. Peter, restore our brother Ignatius to his former station, to his see, to his dignity as patriarch, and to all the honours of his office. Whoever, after the promulgation of this decree, shall presume to disturb him in the exercise of his office, separate from his communion, or dare to judge him anew, without the consent of the apostolic see, if a clerk, shall share the eternal punishment of the traitor Judas; if a layman, he has incurred the malediction of Canaan; he is excommunicate, and will suffer the same fearful sentence from the eternal Judge.”

Never had the power of the clergy or the supremacy of Rome been asserted so distinctly, so inflexibly. The privileges of Rome were eternal, immutable, anterior to, derived from no synod or council, but granted directly by God himself; they might be assailed, but not transferred; torn off for a time, but not plucked up by the roots. An appeal was open to Rome from all the world, from her authority lay no appeal. The emperor and Constantinople paid no regard to these terrible anathemas of the pope.

SYNOD AT CONSTANTINOPLE

[Sidenote: [867 A.D.]]

In the year 867 Photius had summoned a council at Constantinople; the obsequious prelates listened to the arraignment, and joined in the counter excommunication of Pope Nicholas. Photius drew up eight articles inculpating in one the faith, in the rest the departure, of the see of Rome from ancient and canonical discipline. Among the dreadful acts of heresy and schism which were to divide forever the churches of the East and West were: (1) the observance of Saturday as a fast; (2) the permission to eat milk or cheese during Lent; (4) the restriction of the chrism to the bishops; (6) the promotion of deacons at once to the episcopal dignity; (7) the consecration of a lamb, according to the hated Jewish usage; (8) the shaving of their beards by the clergy. The fifth only of the articles objected to by Photius, the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, was an error so awful as to deserve a thousand anathemas. The third, condemning the enforced celibacy of the clergy, was alone of high moral or religious importance. “From this usage we see in the West,” says Photius, “so many children who know not their fathers.” These, however, were but the pretexts for division. The cause lay deeper, in the total denial of the papal supremacy by the Greeks; their unequivocal assertion that with the empire that supremacy had passed to Constantinople.

The decree of the council boasted the signature of the emperor (obtained, it was said, in an hour of drunkenness); of Basil the Macedonian, averred (most improbably) to have been forged; of the three eastern patriarchs; of the senate and the great officers; of abbots and bishops to the number of nearly one thousand. But the episcopal messenger who was to bear to Rome this defiance of the church of Constantinople and the counter-excommunication of the pope, had proceeded but a short way on his journey when he was stopped by the orders of the new emperor. A revolution in the palace was a revolution in the church of Constantinople. The first act of Basil the Macedonian was to depose Photius. Photius is said to have refused the communion to the murderer Basil. From this time a succession of changes agitated the empire; Photius rose or fell at each successive change.

Leo the Philosopher, the son of Basil, once more ignominiously expelled him from his throne. Yet, though accused of treason, Photius was acquitted and withdrew into honoured retirement. He did not live to witness or profit by another revolution. Though the schism of thirty years, properly speaking, expired in his person, and again a kind of approximation to Rome took place, yet the links were broken which united the two churches. The articles of difference, from which neither would depart, had been defined and hardened into rigid dogmas. During the dark times of the papacy which followed the disruption, even the intercourse became more and more precarious. The popes of the next century were too busy in defending their territories or their lives to regard the affairs of the East. The darkness which gathered round both churches shrouded them from each other’s sight.

[Sidenote: [860-867 A.D.]]

Nicholas the Great had not lived to triumph even in the first fall of Photius. In the West his success was more complete; he had the full enjoyment of conscious power exercised in a righteous cause. Not merely did he behold one of Charlemagne’s successors prostrate at his feet, obliged to abandon to papal censure and to degradation even his high ecclesiastical partisans, but in succession the greatest prelates of the West, the archbishop of Ravenna, the archbishops of Cologne and Trèves, and even Hincmar, the archbishop of Rheims, who seemed to rule despotically over the church and kingdom of France, were forced to bow before his vigorous supremacy.

The matrimonial cause which for many years distracted part of France, on which council after council met, and on which the great prelates of Lorraine came into direct collision with the pope, and were reduced to complete and unpitied humiliation under his authority, was that of King Lothair and his queen Theutberga, as elsewhere described. He threatened the king with immediate excommunication if he did not dismiss the concubine Waldrada, and receive his repudiated queen. He then betook himself to Attigny, the residence of Charles the Bald. He peremptorily commanded the restoration of the bishop Rothrad, who had been canonically, as it was asserted, deposed by Hincmar his metropolitan, and was now irregularly, without inquiry or examination, replaced by the arbitrary mandate of the pope. Hincmar murmured and obeyed; the trembling king acquiesced in the papal decree.

But Nicholas did not live to enjoy his perfect triumph; he died in November, 867 A.D.--a pontiff who, if he advanced no absolutely unexampled pretensions to supremacy in behalf of the Roman see, yet, by the favourable juncture and auspicious circumstances which he seized to assert and maintain that authority, did more than all his predecessors to strengthen and confirm it. During all his conflicts in the West with the royal and with the episcopal power, the moral and religious sympathies of mankind could not but be on his side. If his language was occasionally more violent, even contemptuous, than became the moderation which, up to this time, had mitigated the papal decrees, he might plead lofty and righteous indignation; if he interfered with domestic relations, it was in defence of the innocent and defenceless, and in vindication of the sanctity of marriage; if he treated kings with scorn, it was because they had become contemptible for their weakness or their vices; if he interfered with episcopal or metropolitan jurisdiction, the inferior clergy, even bishops, would be pleased to have a remote, and possibly disinterested tribunal, to which they might appeal from prelates, chosen only from aristocratic connections, barbarians in occupation and in ferocity; if he was inexorable to transgressors, it was to those of the highest order, prelates who had lent themselves to injustice and iniquity, and had defied his power; if he annulled councils, those councils had already been condemned for their injustice, had deserved the reproachful appellation with which they were branded by the pope, with all who had any innate or unperverted sentiment of justice and purity. Hence the presumptuous usurpation even of divine power, so long as it was thus beneficently used, awed, confounded all, and offended few. Men took no alarm at the arrogance which befriended them against the oppressor and the tyrant.

But this vast moral advancement of the popedom was not all which the Roman see owes to Nicholas I; she owes the questionable boon of the recognition of the False Decretals as the law of the church.

THE FALSE DECRETALS

[Sidenote: [858-869 A.D.]]

Nicholas I not only saw during his pontificate the famous False Decretals take their place in the jurisprudence of Latin Christendom; if he did not promulgate, he assumed them as authentic documents; he gave them the weight of the papal sanction; and with their aid prostrated at his feet the one great transalpine prelate who could still maintain the independence of the Teutonic church, Hincmar archbishop of Rheims.

Up to this period the decretals, the letters or edicts of the bishops of Rome, according to the authorised or common collection of Dionysius, commenced with Pope Siricius, towards the close of the fourth century. To the collection of Dionysius was added that of the authentic councils, which bore the name of Isidore of Seville. On a sudden was promulgated, unannounced, without preparation, not absolutely unquestioned, but apparently overawing at once all doubt, a new code, which to the former authentic documents added fifty-nine letters and decrees of the twenty oldest popes from Clement to Melchiades (Miltiades), and the donation of Constantine; and in the third part, among the decrees of the popes and of the councils from Silvester to Gregory II, thirty-nine false decrees, and the acts of several unauthentic councils. In this vast manual of sacerdotal Christianity the popes appear from the first the parents, guardians, legislators of the faith throughout the world. The False Decretals do not merely assert the supremacy of the popes--the dignity and privileges of the bishop of Rome--they comprehend the whole dogmatic system and discipline of the church, the whole hierarchy from the highest to the lowest degree, their sanctity, and immunities, their persecutions, their disputes, their right of appeal to Rome.

But for the too manifest design, the aggrandisement of the see of Rome and the aggrandisement of the whole clergy in subordination to the see of Rome; but for the monstrous ignorance of history, which betrays itself in glaring anachronisms, and in the utter confusion of the order of events and the lives of distinguished men--the former awakening keen and jealous suspicion, the latter making the detection of the spuriousness of the whole easy, clear, irrefragable--the False Decretals might still have maintained their place in ecclesiastical history. They are now given up by all; not a voice is raised in their favour; the utmost that is done by those who cannot suppress all regret at their explosion, is to palliate the guilt of the forger, to call in question or to weaken the influence which they had in their own day, and throughout the later history of Christianity.

The author or authors of this most audacious and elaborate of pious frauds are unknown; the date and place of its compilation are driven into such narrow limits that they may be determined within a few years, and within a very circumscribed region. The False Decretals came not from Rome; the time of their arrival at Rome, after they were known beyond the Alps, appears almost certain. In one year Nicholas I is apparently ignorant of their existence, the next he speaks of them with full knowledge. They contain words manifestly used at the Council of Paris (829 A.D.), consequently are of later date; they were known to the Levite Benedict of Metz, who composed a supplement to the collection of capitularies by Adgesil, between 840-847 A.D. The city of Metz is designated with nearly equal certainty as the place in which, if not actually composed, they were first promulgated as the canon law of Christendom.

The state of affairs in the divided and distracted empire might seem almost to call for, almost to justify, this desperate effort to strengthen the ecclesiastical power. All the lower clergy, including some of the bishops, were groaning, just at this time, under heavy oppression. By the constitution of Charlemagne, which survived under Louis the Pious, and, so long as the empire maintained its unity, asserted the independence of the transalpine hierarchy of all but the temporal sovereign, the clergy were under strict subordination to the bishop, the bishop to the metropolitan, the metropolitan only to the emperor. Conflicting popes, or popes in conflict with Italian enemies, or with their own subjects, had reduced the papacy to vassalage under the empire. Conflicting kings, on the division of the realm of Charlemagne, had not yet, but were soon about to submit the empire to the Roman supremacy. All at present was anarchy. The Germans and the French were drawing asunder into separate rival nations; the sons of Louis were waging an endless, implacable strife. Almost every year, less than every decade of years, beheld a new partition of the empire; kingdoms rose and fell, took new boundaries, acknowledged new sovereigns; no government was strong enough to maintain the law; might was the only law.

The hierarchy, if not the whole clergy, had taken the lead in the disruption of the unity of the empire; they had abased the throne of Louis; they were for a short disastrous period now the victims of that abasement. Their wealth was their danger. They had become secular princes, they had become nobles, they had become vast landed proprietors. But during the civil wars it was not the persuasive voice, but the strong arm, which had authority; the mitre must bow before the helmet, the crosier before the sword. Not only the domains, the persons of the clergy had lost their sanctity. The persecution and oppression of the church and the clergy had reached a height unknown in former times.

It might occur to the most religious that for the sake of religion; it might occur to those to whom the dignity and interest of the sacerdotal order were their religion, that some effort must be made to reinvest the clergy in their imperilled sanctity. There must be some appeal against this secular, this ecclesiastical tyranny; and whither should appeal be? It could not be to the Scriptures, to the Gospel. It must be to ancient and venerable tradition, to the unrepealed, irrepealable law of the church; to remote and awful Rome. Rome must be proclaimed in an unusual, more emphatic manner, the eternal, immemorial court of appeal. The tradition must not rest on the comparatively recent names of Leo the Great, of Innocent the Great, of Siricius, or the right of appeal depend on the decree of the Council of Sardica. It must come down from the successors of St. Peter himself in unbroken succession. The whole clergy must have a perpetual, indefeasible sanctity of the same antiquity. So may the idea of this, to us it seems, monstrous fiction have dawned upon its author; himself may have implicitly believed that he asserted no prerogative for Rome which Rome herself had not claimed, which he did not think to be her right. It is even now asserted, perhaps can hardly be disproved, that the False Decretals advanced no pretensions in favour of the see of Rome which had not been heard before in some vague and indefinite, but not therefore less significant, language. The boldness of the act was in the new authority in which it arrayed these pretensions. The new code was enshrined, as it were, in a framework of deeply religious thought and language; it was introduced under the venerated name of Isidore of Seville; it was thus attached to the authentic work of Isidore, which had long enjoyed undisputed authority. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, as the most powerful, so, perhaps, the most learned transalpine ecclesiastic, who might at once have exposed the fiction, which he could hardly but know to be a fiction, co-operated more than anyone else to establish its authority. So long as he supposed it to advance or confirm his own power, he suppressed all intrusive doubts; he discovered too late that it was a trap (a mousetrap is his own undignified word) to catch unwary metropolitans. Hincmar was caught, beyond all hope of escape. In the appeal of Rothrad, bishop of Soissons, against Hincmar, metropolitan of Rheims, Pope Nicholas I at first alleges no word of the new decretals in favour of his right of appeal; he seemingly knows no older authority than that of Innocent, Leo, Siricius, and the Council of Sardica. The next year not merely is he fully master of the pseudo-Isidorian documents, but he taunts Hincmar with now calling in question, when it makes against him, authority which he was ready to acknowledge in confirmation of his own power. Hincmar is forced to the humiliation of submission. Rothrad, deposed by Hincmar, deposed by the Council of Senlis, is reinstated in his see.

This immediate, if somewhat cautious, adoption of the fiction, unquestionably not the forgery, by Pope Nicholas, appears less capable of charitable palliation than the original invention. Nor did the successors of Nicholas betray any greater scruple in strengthening themselves by this welcome, and therefore only unsuspicious aid. It is impossible to deny that, at least by citing without reserve or hesitation, the Roman pontiffs gave their deliberate sanction to this great historic fraud.

Nor must be overlooked, perhaps, the more important result of the acceptance of the pseudo-Isidorian statutes as the universal, immemorial, irrepealable law of Christendom. It established the great principle which Nicholas I had before announced, of the sole legislative power of the pope. Every one of these papal epistles was a canon of the church; every future bull therefore rested on the same irrefragable authority, commanded the same implicit obedience. The papacy became a legislative as well as an administrative authority. Infallibility was the next inevitable step, if infallibility was not already in the power asserted to have been bestowed by the Lord on St. Peter, by St. Peter handed down in unbroken descent, and in a plenitude which could not be restricted or limited, to his successors.

ADRIAN II

Nicholas was succeeded (November, 867) by Adrian II, a rigid and lofty churchman, who, though his policy at first appeared doubtful, resolutely maintained, but not with equal judgment and success, the principles of his predecessor. Adrian (he was now seventy-five years old) had been married before he became a priest. At the intercession of the emperor Louis, he took off the ban of excommunication from Waldrada, and restored her to the communion of the church. By this lenity he might seem to lure King Lothair to the last act of submission. The king of Lorraine arrived in Italy. The pope seemed to yield to the influence of Louis and the empress Ingelberga; at least he accepted the munificent presents of the king.

[Sidenote: [869-876 A.D.]]

From Monte Cassino, where they first met, Lothair followed the pope to Rome. There, instead of being received as a king, and as one reconciled with the see of Rome, when he entered the church all was silent and vacant; not one of the clergy appeared; he retired to a neighbouring chamber, which was not even swept for his reception. The next day was Sunday, and he hoped to hear the mass chanted before him. The pope refused him this honour. He dined, however, the next day with the pope, and an interchange of presents took place. At length Adrian consented to admit him to the communion.

Pope Adrian seized the occasion of the contest for the kingdom of Lothair to advance still more daring and unprecedented pretensions. But the world was not yet ripe for this broad and naked assertion of secular power by the pope, his claim to interfere in the disposal of kingdoms. Directly he left the strong ground of moral and religious authority, from which his predecessor Nicholas had commanded the world, he encountered insurmountable resistance. With all that remained of just and generous sympathy on their side popes might intermeddle in the domestic relations of kings; they were not permitted as yet to touch the question of royal succession or inheritance. The royal and the episcopal power had quailed before Nicholas; the fulminations of Adrian were treated with contempt or indifference: and Hincmar of Rheims in this quarrel with Adrian regained that independence and ascendency which had been obscured by his temporary submission to Nicholas.

Nicholas I and Adrian II thus, with different success, imperiously dictating to sovereigns, ruling or attempting to rule the higher clergy in foreign countries with a despotic sway, mingling in the political revolutions of Europe, awarding crowns, and adjudging kingly inheritances, might seem the immediate ancestors of Gregory VII, of Innocent III, of Boniface VIII. But the papacy had to undergo a period of gloom and degradation, even of guilt, before it emerged again to its height of power.

The pontificate of John VIII (872) is the turning-point in this gradual, but rapid and almost total change; among its causes were the extinction of the imperial branch of the Carlovingian race and the frequent transference of the empire from one line of sovereigns to another; with the growth of the formidable dukes and counts in Italy, which overshadowed the papal power and reduced the pope himself to the slave or the victim of one of the contending factions. The pope was elected, deposed, imprisoned, murdered. In the wild turbulence of the times not merely the reverence but the sanctity of his character disappeared. He sank to the common level of mortals; and the head of Christendom was as fierce and licentious as the petty princes who surrounded him, out of whose stock he sprang, and whose habits he did not break off when raised to the papal throne.

John VIII, however, still stood on the vantage ground occupied by Nicholas I and Adrian II. He was a Roman by birth. He signalised his pontificate by an act even more imposing than those of his predecessors, the nomination to the empire, which his language represented rather as a grant from the papal authority than as an hereditary dignity; it was a direct gift from heaven, conveyed at the will of the pope. Already there appear indications of a French and German interest contending for the papal influence which grows into more and more decided faction, till the Carlovingian empire is united, soon to be dissolved forever, in the person of Charles the Fat. John VIII adopted the dangerous policy of a partial adherence to France. But the historians are almost unanimous as to the price which Charles was compelled to pay for his imperial crown. He bought the pope, he bought the senators of Rome; he bought, if we might venture to take the words to the letter, St. Peter himself.

[Sidenote: [876-878 A.D.]]

The imperial reign of Charles the Bald was short and inglorious. The whole pontificate of John VIII was a long, if at times interrupted, agony of apprehension lest Rome should fall into the hands of the unbeliever. The reign of the late emperor Louis had been almost a continual warfare against the Mohammedans, who had now obtained a firm footing in southern Italy. He had successfully repelled their progress, but at the death of Louis Rome was again in danger of becoming a Mohammedan city. The pope wrote letter after letter in the most urgent and feeling language to Charles the Bald soon after he had invested him with the empire. “If all the trees in the forest,” such is the style of the pope, “were turned into tongues, they could not describe the ravages of these impious pagans; the devout people of God are destroyed by a continual slaughter; he who escapes the fire and the sword is carried as a captive into exile. Cities, castles, and villages are utterly wasted, and without an inhabitant. The bishops are wandering about in beggary, or fly to Rome as the only place of refuge.”

Yet, if possible, even more formidable than the infidels were the petty Christian princes of Italy. “The canker-worm eats what the locust has left.” In many parts of Italy had gradually arisen independent dukedoms; and none of these appear to have felt any religious respect for the pope, some not for Christianity. On the vacancy after the death of Pope Nicholas, Lambert of Spoleto had occupied and pillaged Rome, respecting neither monastery nor church, and carrying off a great number of young females of the highest rank. Adelchis, the duke of Benevento, had dared to seize in that city the sacred person of the emperor Louis. He was only permitted to leave the city after he had taken a solemn oath to Adelchis--an oath in which his wife, his daughter, and all his attendants were compelled to join--that he would neither in his own person nor by any other revenge this act of insolent rebellion. No sooner, however, had Louis reached Ravenna in safety than he sent to the pope to absolve him from his oath. Adrian II, then pope, began to assert that dangerous privilege of absolution from solemn and recorded oaths.

The bishop-duke of Spoleto did not scruple to return to the unhallowed policy of his brother. He entered into a new league with the Saracens, gave them quarters, and actually uniting his troops with theirs, defeated the forces of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno, and opened a free passage for their incursions to the gates of Rome.

The imperial crown was again vacant, and claimed by the conflicting houses of France and Germany. But Carloman, son of Ludwig of Germany, had been acknowledged as king of Italy. Probably as partisans of the German, and to compel the pope to abandon the interest of the French line, to which he adhered with unshaken fidelity, Lambert, duke of Spoleto, that antichrist, as the pope described him, with his adulterous sister, Richildis, and his accomplice, the treacherous Adalbert, count of Tuscany, at the head of an irresistible force, entered Rome, seized and confined the pope, and endeavoured to starve him into concession, and compelled the clergy and the Romans to take an oath of allegiance to Carloman, as king of Italy. For thirty days the religious services were interrupted; not a single lamp burned on the altars.

[Sidenote: [878-891 A.D.]]

No sooner had they retired than the pope caused all the sacred treasures to be conveyed from St. Peter’s to the Lateran, covered the altar of St. Peter with sackcloth, closed the doors, and refused to permit the pilgrims from distant lands to approach the shrine. He then fled to Ostia, and embarked for France.

When he reached the shores of Provence, John VIII felt himself in another world. Instead of turbulent and lawless enemies (such were the counts and dukes of Italy) whose rapacity or animosity paid no respect to sacred things, and treated the pope like an ordinary mortal, the whole kingdom of France might seem to throw itself humbly at his feet. No pope was more prodigal of excommunication than John VIII. Of his letters (above three hundred) it is remarkable how large a proportion threaten, inflict, or at least allude to this last exercise of sacerdotal power.

The indefatigable pope returned over the Alps by the Mont Cenis, to Turin and Pavia; but of all whom he had so commandingly exhorted, and so earnestly implored to march for his protection against the Saracens, and no doubt against his Italian enemies, none obeyed but Duke Boson of Provence. The Saracens, in the meantime, courted by all parties, impartially plundered all, made or broke alliances with the same facility with the Christians, while the poor monks, even of St. Benedict’s own foundation, lived in perpetual fear of spoliation. The last days of John VIII were occupied in writing more and more urgent letters for aid to Charles the Fat, in warfare, or providing means of war against his Saracen and Christian foes, or dealing excommunications on all sides; yet facing with gallant resolution the foes of his person and his power. This violent pope is said (but by one writer only) to have come to a violent end; his brains were beaten out with a mallet by some enemy, covetous of his wealth and ambitious of the papal crown.

The short pontificate of Marinus (Marinus I or Martin II) was followed by the still shorter rule of Adrian III, which lasted but fourteen months. That of Stephen V, though not of longer duration, witnessed events of far more importance to the papacy, to Italy, and to Christendom. On the death of Charles the Fat, the ill-cemented edifice of the Carlovingian Empire, the discordant materials of which had reunited, not by natural affinity but almost by the force of accident, dissolved again and forever. The legitimate race of Charlemagne expired in the person of his unworthy descendant, whose name, derived from mere physical bulk, contrasted with the mental greatness, the commanding qualities of military, administrative, and even intellectual superiority which had blended with the name of the first Charles the appellation of the Great.

POPE FORMOSUS

[Sidenote: [891-897 A.D.]]

The death of Stephen, September, 891, and the election of Formosus to the papacy, changed the aspect of affairs, and betrayed the hostilities still rankling at Rome. By the election of Formosus was violated the ordinary canonical rule against the translation of bishops from one see to another (Formosus was bishop of Porto), which was still held in some respect. There were yet stronger objections to the election of a bishop who had been excommunicated by a former pontiff, excommunicated as an accomplice in a conspiracy to murder the pope. The excommunicated Formosus had been compelled to take an oath never to resume his episcopal functions, never to return to Rome, and never to presume but to lay communion. The successor of John had granted absolution from these penalties, from this oath.

This election must have been a desperate measure of an unscrupulous faction. Nor was Formosus chosen without a fierce and violent struggle.

The suffrages of a party among the clergy and people had already fallen upon Sergius. He was actually at the altar preparing for the solemn ceremony of inauguration, when he was torn away by the stronger faction. Formosus, chosen, as his partisans declared, for his superior learning and knowledge of the Scripture, was then invested in the papal dignity.

When Pope Formosus died, May 23rd, 896, the election fell to Boniface VII. The new pontiff laboured under the imputation of having been twice deposed for his profligate and scandalous life, first from the subdiaconate, afterwards from the priesthood. Boniface died of the gout fifteen days after his elevation. The Italian party hastened to the election of Stephen VI.

Probably the German governor had withdrawn before Stephen and his faction proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the lifeless remains of Formosus. Fierce political animosity took the form of ecclesiastical solemnity. The body was disinterred, dressed in the papal habiliments, and, before a council assembled for the purpose, addressed in these words: “Wherefore wert thou, being bishop of Porto, tempted by ambition to usurp the Catholic see of Rome?” The deacon who had been assigned as counsel for the dead maintained a prudent silence. The sacred vestments were then stripped from the body, three of the fingers cut off, the body cast into the Tiber. All who had been ordained by Formosus were reordained by Stephen. Such, however, were the vicissitudes of popular feeling in Rome, that some years after a miracle was said to have asserted the innocence of Formosus. His body was found by fishermen in the Tiber, and carried back for burial in the church of St. Peter. As the coffin passed, all the images in the church reverentially bowed their heads.

The pontificate of Stephen soon came to an end. A new revolution revenged the disinterment of the insulted prelate. And now the fierceness of political rather than religious faction had utterly destroyed all reverence for the sacred person of the pope. Stephen was thrown into prison by his enemies, and strangled. The convenient charge of usurpation, always brought against the popes whom their adversaries dethroned or put to death, may have reconciled their minds to the impious deed, but it is difficult to discover in what respect the title of Pope Stephen VI was defective.

[Sidenote: [897-911 A.D.]]

Pope now succeeded pope with such rapidity as to awaken the inevitable suspicion, either that those were chosen who were likely to make a speedy vacancy, or they received but a fatal gift in the pontificate of Rome. Romanus and Theodore II survived their promotion each only a few months. The latter, by his restoration of Formosus to the rights of Christian burial, and by his reversal of the acts of Stephen VI, may be presumed to have belonged to that faction. The next election was contested with all the strength and violence of the adverse parties. John IX was successful; his competitor Sergius, according to some accounts formerly the discomfited competitor of Formosus, and his bitter and implacable enemy, fled to the powerful protection of the marquis of Tuscany. Sergius was excommunicated, with several other priests and inferior clergy, as accessory to the insults against the body of Formosus. Sergius laughed to scorn the thunders of his rival, so long as he was under the protection of the powerful house of Tuscany. With John IX, who died July, 901, closed the ninth century of Christianity; the tenth, in Italy at least the iron age, had already darkened upon Rome; the pontificate had been won by crime and vacated by murder.

This iron age, as it has been called, opened with the pontificate of Benedict IV (900-903), the successor of John IX. The only act recorded of Benedict IV was the coronation of the unfortunate Louis of Provence, the competitor of Berengar for the empire. Louis, according to imperial usage, set up his tribunal and adjudged causes at Rome. On the death of Benedict, the prudent precautions established by John IX to introduce some regularity and control over the anarchy of an election by a clergy rent into factions by a lawless nobility, and still more lawless people, during this utter helplessness and the abeyance, or the strife for the empire between rival princes, fell into utter neglect or impotency. The papacy became the prize of the most active, daring, and violent. Leo V won the prize; before two months he was ejected and thrown into prison by Christopher, one of his own presbyters and chaplains. The same year, or early in the next, Christopher was in his turn ignominiously driven from Rome.

It was under the protection of the powerful Tuscan prince Berengar that the exiled Sergius, at the head of a strong force of Tuscan soldiers, appeared in Rome, deposed Christopher, who had just deposed Leo V, and took possession of the papal throne. Sergius had been seven years an exile in Tuscany; for seven years he ruled as supreme but not undisputed pontiff. This pope has been loaded with every vice and every enormity which can blacken the character of man. Yet as to his reign there is almost total obscurity. The only certain act which has transpired is his restoration of the Lateran palace, which had fallen into ruins; an act which indicates a period of comparative peace and orderly administration, with the command of a large revenue. In these violent times Sergius probably scrupled at no violence; but if he drove a pope from the throne of St. Peter, that pope had just before deposed his patron, and with great cruelty.

THEODORA IN POWER

But during the papacy of Sergius rose into power the infamous Theodora, with her daughters Marozia and Theodora, the prostitutes who, in the strong language of historians, disposed for many years the papal tiara, and not content with disgracing by their own licentious lives the chief city of Christendom, actually placed their profligate paramours or base-born sons in the chair of St. Peter. The influence obtained by Theodora and her daughters, if it shows not the criminal connivance of Pope Sergius, or a still more disgraceful connection with which he was charged by the scandal of the times, proves at least the utter degradation of the papal power in Rome. It had not only lost all commanding authority, but could not even maintain outward decency. Theodora was born of a noble and wealthy senatorial family, on whom she has entailed an infamous immortality. The women of Rome seem at successive periods seized with a kind of Roman ambition to surpass their sex by the greatness of their virtues and of their vices. These females were to the Paulas and Eustochiums of the younger and severer age of Roman Christianity, what the Julias and Messallinas of the empire were to the Volumnias and Cornelias of the republic.

[Sidenote: [911-928 A.D.]]

It must be acknowledged that if the stern language of Tacitus and Juvenal may have darkened the vices of the queens and daughters of the cæsars, the bishop of Cremona,[s] our chief authority on the enormities of Theodora and her daughters, wants the moral dignity, while he is liable to the same suspicion as those great writers. Throughout the lives of the pontiffs themselves we have to balance between the malignant license of satire and the unmeaning phrases of adulatory panegyric. On the other hand it is difficult to decide which is more utterly unchristian--the profound hatred which could invent or accredit such stories; the utter dissoluteness which made them easily believed; or the actual truth of such charges.

Liutprand[s] relates that John, afterwards the tenth pope of that name, being employed in Rome on some ecclesiastical matters by the archbishop of Ravenna, was the paramour of Theodora, who not only allowed but compelled him to her embraces. John was first appointed to the see of Bologna; but the archbishopric of Ravenna, the second ecclesiastical dignity in Italy, falling vacant before he had been consecrated, he was advanced by the same dominant influence to that see. But Theodora bore with impatience the separation of two hundred miles from her lover. Anastasius III had succeeded Sergius (911) and occupied the papacy for rather more than two years; after him Lando for six months (913). On the death of Lando (914) by a more flagrant violation of the canonical rule than that charged against the dead body of Formosus, John was translated from the archiepiscopate of Ravenna to the see of Rome. But Theodora, if she indeed possessed this dictatorial power, and the clergy and people of Rome, if they yielded to her dictation, may have been actuated by nobler and better motives than her gratification of a lustful passion, if not by motives purely Christian. For however the archbishop of Ravenna might be no example of piety or holiness as the spiritual head of Christendom, he appears to have been highly qualified for the secular part of his office. He was a man of ability and daring, eminently wanted at this juncture to save Rome from becoming the prey of Mohammedan conquest, organising a powerful confederacy of neighbouring dukes to accomplish this purpose.

He placed himself at the head of the army, and for the first time the successor of St. Peter, the vicar of the Prince of peace, rode forth in his array to battle. And if success, as it doubtless was, might be interpreted as a manifestation of divine approval, the total discomfiture of the Saracens and the destruction of the troublesome fortress on the Garigliano seemed to sanction this new and unseemly character assumed by the pope. Even the apostles sanctioned or secured by their presence the triumph of the warlike pope.

For fourteen years (914-928), obscure as regards Rome and the pontificate, this powerful prelate occupied the see of Rome. If he gained it (a doubtful charge) by the vices and influence of the mother Theodora, he lost it, together with his life, by the no less flagrant vices and more monstrous power of the daughter Marozia.

THE INFAMOUS MAROZIA

[Sidenote: [925-931 A.D.]]

Theodora disappears; and Pope John X is found engaged in a fierce contest for the mastery of Rome with Marozia and her lover or husband, the marquis Alberic, by whom she had a son of the same name, afterwards tyrant of the city. The vigorous and martial pontiff succeeds in expelling Alberic from the city; Alberic probably met his death soon after (925). It is said that he was murdered by the Romans in revenge for some secret alliance entered into with the Hungarians, who were then wasting Italy, and had reached the very frontiers of Calabria.

The death of her husband increased rather than weakened the power of Marozia. Her personal charms, and her unscrupulous use of them, are said to have multiplied to an infinite extent her adherents. Her paramours made a strong party. The empire was vacant. There was no potentate to whom the pope could appeal. Marozia seized the castle of St. Angelo, and with this precious dowry, which commanded Rome, she sought to confirm her power by some splendid alliance. Guido, the duke of Tuscany, the son of Adalbert the marquis, did not disdain the nuptials with a profligate woman who brought Rome as her marriage portion.

John X was left to contest alone the government of Rome with Marozia and her Tuscan husband. Neither Rome nor the mistress of Rome regarded the real services rendered by John X to Christendom and to Italy. The former lover, as public scandal averred, of her mother, the saviour of Rome from the Saracens, was surprised in the Lateran palace by this daring woman. His brother Peter, as it appears, his great support in the contest for the government of Rome, and therefore the object of peculiar hatred to Guido and Marozia, was killed before his face. The pope was thrown into prison, where some months after he died (929) either of anguish and despair, or by more summary means. It was rumoured that he was smothered with a pillow. No means were too violent for Marozia to employ even against a pope.

Marozia did not venture at once to place her son on the papal throne. A Leo VI was pope for some months; a Stephen VII for two years and one month. That son may as yet have been too young even for this shameless woman to advance him to the highest ecclesiastical dignity; her husband Guido may have had some lingering respect for the sacred office, some struggling feelings of decency. But at the death of Stephen, Marozia again ruled alone in Rome; her husband Guido was dead, and her son was pope. John XI (according to the rumours of the time, of which Liutprand,[s] a follower of Hugo of Provence, may be accepted as a faithful reporter) was the offspring of Marozia by the pope Sergius; more trustworthy authorities make him the lawful son of her husband Alberic. But the obsequious clergy and people acquiesced without resistance in the commands of their patrician mistress; the son of Marozia is successor of St. Peter.

But the aspiring Marozia, not content with having been the wife of a marquis, the wife of the wealthy and powerful duke of Tuscany, perhaps the mistress of one, certainly the mother of another pope, looked still higher in her lustful ambition; she must wed a monarch. She sent to offer herself and the city of Rome to the new king of Italy, Hugo of Provence, who was not scrupulous in his amours, lawful or unlawful. Through policy or through passion he was always ready to form or to break these tender connections. The cautious Marozia would not allow his army to enter the city, but received her royal bridegroom in the castle of St. Angelo. There was celebrated this unhallowed marriage.

REBELLION OF ROME

[Sidenote: [931-953 A.D.]]

But though the Romans would brook the dominion of a Roman woman, they would not endure that of a foreigner. The coarse vices, the gluttony of the soldiers of Hugo offended the fastidious Italians. The insolence of Hugo himself provoked a rebellion. The nobles were called upon to perform menial offices, usual probably in the half feudal transalpine courts but alien to Italian manners. Alberic, the son of Marozia, was commanded to hold the water in which King Hugo washed his hands. Performing his office awkwardly or reluctantly, he spilled the water, and received a blow on the face from the king. Already may Alberic have been jealous of the promotion of his brother to the popedom, and have resented this devotion of his mother to her new foreign connections. He was a youth of daring; he organised a conspiracy among the nobles of Rome; he appealed to the old Roman pride: “Shall these Burgundians, of old the slaves of Rome, tyrannise over Romans?” At the tolling of the bell the whole people flocked to his banner, and attacked the castle of St. Angelo before Hugo could admit his own troops. Alberic remained master of the castle, of his mother, and of the pope. These two he cast into prison, defied the king of Italy, who made an ignominious retreat, and from that time remained master of Rome.

For four years Pope John XI lingered in fact a prisoner, at least without any share in the government of Rome, only permitted to perform his spiritual functions. Alberic ruled undisturbed. King Hugo attempted to bribe him to the surrender of Rome, by the offer of his daughter in marriage; the more crafty Alberic married the daughter, and retained possession of Rome. After the death of John a succession of popes, appointed, no doubt, by the sole will of Alberic, Leo VII, Stephen IX, Marinus II (or Martin III) Agapetus II, pass over the throne of the popedom, with hardly a sign of their power in Rome, no indication of their dignity, still less of their sanctity. They are still Popes beyond the Alps. Nor was the supreme pontiff alone depressed in these turbulent times. The great ecclesiastics are mingled in most of the treacherous and bloody transactions of the period. Individual energy gave the bishops of the city great power, but as they acted with as little restraint, so these prelates were treated with as little reverence as secular princes.

During the whole reign of Hugo of Provence, notwithstanding the open or treacherous assaults of that king, Alberic, whether as an armed tyrant commanding Rome from the castle of St. Angelo, or as the head of a republic and recognised by the voice of the Roman people, had maintained his authority. He had ruled for twenty-two years; he bequeathed that authority, on his death (953), to his son Octavian.

POPE JOHN XII

[Sidenote: [953-963 A.D.]]

Octavian, though only nineteen years old, aspired to unite, in his own person, the civil and spiritual supremacy. He was already in holy orders; two years after the death of his father Alberic, the pope Agapetus II died; and Octavian, by the voluntary or enforced suffrages of the clergy and the people, was elected pope. He was the first of the Roman pontiffs who changed, or rather took a second ecclesiastical name; the civil government seems to have been conducted in that of Octavian; the church was administered under that of John XII.

In the meantime had arisen in Germany a monarch more powerful than had appeared in Europe since the death of Charlemagne, Otto (Otho) the Great. Otto made some disposition for a visit to Rome to receive the imperial crown from the hands of the pope Agapetus. All Italy looked for the coming of the new Charlemagne. On his appearance resistance vanished. Berengar and Adalbert shut themselves up in their strongest fortresses. It was a triumphal procession to Pavia--to Rome. At Pavia Otto the Great was crowned king of Italy, at Rome the pope anointed him as emperor (962). Thenceforth the king of Germany claimed to be Western emperor. Otto swore to protect the church of Rome against all her enemies, to maintain her rights and privileges, to restore her lands and possessions, when he should have recovered them, and to make no change in the government of Rome without the sanction of the pope. John XII and the Roman people took the oath of allegiance to the emperor; they swore more particularly to abandon all connection with Berengar and his son. The oath was taken on the body of St. Peter.

Yet no sooner had the emperor returned to Pavia, than the perfidious John, finding that he had unwarily introduced a master instead of an obsequious ally, began to enter into correspondence with Adalbert, who, driven from every Italian city, had found refuge with the Saracens. Rumours of this treason reached the emperor. The noble German would not believe the monstrous perfidy; he sent some trustworthy officers to inquire into the truth; they returned with a fearful list of crimes, of license, and cruelty, with which the son of Alberic, who seems entirely to have sunk the character of pope in that of the young, warlike, secular prince, was charged by the unanimous voice of Rome. In July, 963, Otto marched upon the capital; the pontiff had reckoned on the cordial support of the people; they recoiled; the pope and Adalbert fled together from Rome.

TRIAL OF THE POPE

[Sidenote: [963-964 A.D.]]

The emperor summoned an ecclesiastical council; it was attended by the archbishops of Aquileia (by deputy), of Milan, of Ravenna, and Hamburg; by two German and two French metropolitans; by a great number of bishops and presbyters from Lombardy, Tuscany, and all parts of Italy. The whole militia of Rome assembled as a guard to the council round the church of St. Peter. The proceedings of the council mark the times. Inquiry was made why the pope was not present. A general cry of astonishment broke forth from the clergy and the people: “The very Iberians, Babylonians, and Indians have heard the monstrous crimes of the pope. He is not a wolf who condescends to sheep’s clothing; his cruelty, his diabolical dealings are open, avowed, disdain concealment.” The calmer justice of the emperor demanded specific charges. The cardinal presbyter rose and declared that he had seen Pope John celebrate mass without himself communicating. Another, that he had ordained a bishop in a stable; that he had taken bribes for the consecration of bishops, and had ordained a bishop of Todi who was but ten years old. “For his sacrileges, all eyes might behold them;” they alluded, probably, to the dilapidation of the churches, which were open to the weather, and so much out of repair that the worshippers could not assemble from fear lest the roofs should fall on their heads.

Darker charges followed, mingled with less heinous, in strange confusion, charges of adultery, incest, with the names of the females, one his father’s concubines, another a widow and her niece; he had made the Lateran palace a brothel; he had been guilty of hunting; charges of cruelty, the blinding of one dignified ecclesiastic, the castrating another, both had died under the operation; he had let loose fire and sword, and appeared himself constantly armed with sword, lance, helmet, and breast-plate. Both ecclesiastics and laymen accused him of drinking wine for the love of the devil; of invoking, when gambling, heathen deities, the devils Jove and Venus. He had perpetually neglected matins and vespers, and never signed himself with the sign of the cross.

The emperor could speak only German; he commanded the bishop of Cremona to address the assembly in Latin. Liutprand warned the council, he adjured them by the blessed Virgin and by St. Peter, not to bring vague accusations, nor such as could not be supported by accredited testimony, against the holy father. Bishops, deacons, clergy, and people with one voice replied, “If we do not prove these and more crimes against the pope, may St. Peter, who holds the keys of heaven, close the gates against us; may we be stricken with anathema, and may the anathema be ratified at the day of judgment!” They appealed to the whole army of Otto, whether they had not seen the pope in full armour on the other side of the Tiber; but for the river he had been taken in that attire.

Letters were sent summoning the pope to answer to these accusations; accusations some of them so obscene that they would have been thought immodest if made against stage-players. If the pope dreaded any assault from the enraged multitude, the emperor answered for the security of his person. The pope’s reply was brief, contemptuous: “John, the servant of God, to all the bishops. We hear that you design to elect a new pope; if you do, in the name of Almighty God, I excommunicate you; and forbid you to confer orders or to celebrate mass!”

Thrice was Pope John cited before the council. Messengers were sent to Tivoli; the answer was, “The pope was gone out to shoot.” Unprecedented evils demand unprecedented remedies. The emperor was urged to expel this new Judas from the seat of the apostle, and to sanction a new election. Leo, the chief secretary of the Roman see, was unanimously chosen, though a layman, in the room of the apostate John XII.

But the army of Otto, a feudal army, and bound to do service for a limited period, began to diminish; part had been injudiciously dispersed on distant enterprises; the Romans, as usual, soon grew weary of a foreign, a German yoke. The emissaries of Pope John watched the opportunity; a furious insurrection of the people broke out against the emperor and his pope. The valour of Otto, who forced the barricades of the bridge over the Tiber, subdued the rebellion (964). He took a terrible revenge. The supplications of Leo with difficulty arrested the carnage. Otto soon after left Rome, and marched towards Camerino (Camerinum) and Spoleto in pursuit of King Adalbert. The king Berengar and his wife Willa were taken in the castle of St. Leo, and sent into Germany.

[Sidenote: [964-966 A.D.]]

Hardly, however, had Otto left the city when a new rebellion, organised by the patrician females of Rome, rose on the defenceless Leo, and opened the gates of the city to John. Leo with difficulty escaped to the camp of Otto. The remorseless John re-entered the city, resumed his pontifical state, seized and mutilated the leaders of the imperial party; of one he cut off the right hand, of another the tongue, the nose, and two fingers; in this plight they appeared in the imperial camp. An obsequious synod reversed the decrees of that which had deposed John. The Roman people had now embraced the cause of the son of Alberic with more resolute zeal; for the emperor was compelled to delay till he could reassemble a force powerful enough to undertake the siege of the city. Ere this, however, his own vices had delivered Rome from her champion or her tyrant, Christendom from her worst pontiff. While he was pursuing his amours in a distant part of the city, Pope John XII was struck dead (May 14th, 964), by the hand of God, as the more religious supposed; others, by a more natural cause, the poniard of an injured husband.

But it was a Roman or Italian, perhaps a republican feeling which had latterly attached the citizens to the son of Alberic, not personal love or respect for his pontifical character. They boldly proceeded at once, without regard to the emperor, to the election of a new pope, Benedict V. Otto soon appeared before the walls; he summoned the city, and ordered every Roman who attempted to escape to be mutilated. The republic was forced to surrender. Benedict, the new pope, was brought before the emperor. The cardinal archdeacon, who had adhered to the cause of Leo, demanded by what right he had presumed to usurp the pontifical robes during the life-time of Leo, the lawful pope. “If I have sinned,” said the humbled prelate, “have mercy upon me.” The emperor is said to have wept. Benedict threw himself before the feet of Otto, drew off the sacred pallium, and delivered up his crosier to Leo. Leo broke it, and showed it to the people. Benedict was degraded to the order of deacon and sent into banishment in Germany. He died at Hamburg.

The grateful, or vassal pope, in a council, recognises the full right of the emperor Otto and his successors in the kingdom of Italy, as Adrian that of Charlemagne, to elect his own successors to the empire and to approve the pope. This right was to belong forever to the king of the Roman Empire, and to none else.

Early in the next year the emperor Otto recrossed the Alps. Leo VIII died March, 965, and a deputation from Rome followed the emperor to Germany to solicit the reinstatement of the exiled Benedict to the popedom. But Benedict was dead also. The bishop of Narni (John XIII), with the approbation or by the command of the emperor, was elected to the papacy.

[Sidenote: [966-974 A.D.]]

Scarcely had John XIII assumed the pontificate than the barons and the people began to murmur against the haughtiness of the new pontiff. They expelled him from the city with one consent. The prefect Rotfred, not without personal insult to the pope, assumed the government of Rome; for ten months John XIII was an exile from his see, at first a prisoner, afterwards in freedom. From his retreat in Campania he wrote with urgent entreaty to the emperor. Otto made the cause of John his own; for the third time he descended the Alps; the terror of his approach appalled the popular faction. In a counter insurrection in favour of the pope, Rotfred the prefect was killed, and the gates opened to the pontiff; he was received with hymns of joy and gratulation. At Christmas Otto entered Rome; and the emperor and the pope wreaked a terrible vengeance at that holy season on the rebellious city. The proud Roman titles seemed but worthy of derision to the German emperor and his vassal pope. The body of the prefect who had expelled John from the city was dug up out of his grave and torn to pieces. The consuls escaped with banishment beyond the Alps; but the twelve tribunes were hanged; the actual prefect was set upon an ass, with a wine-bag on his head, led through the streets, scourged, and thrown into prison. All Europe, hardened as it was to acts of inhumanity, shuddered at these atrocities.

The rebellion was crushed for a time; during the five remaining years of John’s pontificate the presence of Otto overawed the refractory Romans. He ruled in peace. At his death the undisturbed vacancy of the see for three months implies the humble consultation of Otto’s wishes (he had now returned to Germany) on the appointment of his successor.

The choice fell on Benedict VI, as usual of Roman birth (January 19th, 973). The factions of Rome now utterly baffle conjecture as to their motives, as to the passions, not the principles, which actuated their leaders. Twice (the second time after an interval of ten years, during which he was absent from Rome), the same man, a cardinal deacon, seizes and murders two popes; sets himself up as supreme pontiff; but though with power to commit these enormities, he cannot maintain on either occasion his ill-won tiara.

The formidable Otto the Great died the year of the accession of Benedict VI (December 25th, 967). Otto II, whose character was as yet unknown, had succeeded to the imperial throne; he had been already the colleague of his father in the empire. He had been crowned at Rome by Pope John XIII.

[Sidenote: [974-985 A.D.]]

The year after the accession of Otto II, on a sudden, Boniface, surnamed Francone, described as the son of Ferruccio, a name doubtless well known to his contemporaries, seized the unsuspecting pope Benedict and cast him into a dungeon (July, 974), where shortly after he was strangled. Boniface assumed the papacy, but he had miscalculated the strength of his faction; in one month he was forced to fly the city. Yet he fled not with so much haste but that he carried off all the treasures, even the sacred vessels from the church of St. Peter. He found his way to Constantinople, where he might seem to have been forgotten in his retreat. The peaceful succession of Benedict VII, the nephew or grandson of the famous Alberic, may lead to the conclusion that the faction of that family still survived, and was opposed to that of Boniface. The first act of Benedict, as might be expected, was the assembling a council for the excommunication of the murderer and anti-pope Boniface. This is the first and last important act in the barren annals of Pope Benedict VII. Under the protection of the emperor Otto II, or by the strength of his Roman faction, he retained peaceful possession of the see for nine years, an unusual period of quiet. He was succeeded, no doubt through the influence of the emperor, by John XIV, who was no Roman, but bishop of Pavia. But in the year of John’s accession (983), Otto II was preparing a great armament to avenge a terrible defeat by the Saracens. He had hardly fled from the conquering Saracens, and made his escape from a Greek ship by leaping into the sea and swimming ashore. He now threatened with all the forces of the realm to bridge the Straits of Messina, and reunite Sicily to the empire of the West. In the midst of his preparations he died at Rome.

The fugitive Boniface Francone had kept up his correspondence with Rome; he might presume on the unpopularity of a pontiff, if not of German birth, imposed by foreign influence, and now deprived of his all-powerful protector. With the same suddenness as before, he reappeared in Rome, seized the pope, imprisoned him in the castle of St. Angelo, of which important fortress he had become master, and there put him to death by starvation or by poison (August 20th, 984). He exposed the body to the view of the people, who dared not murmur. He seated himself, as it seems, unresisted, in the papal chair. The holy see was speedily delivered from this murderous usurper. He died suddenly. The people revenged themselves for their own base acquiescence in his usurpation by cowardly insults on his dead body; it was dragged through the streets, and at length buried, either by the compassion or the attachment (for Boniface must have had a powerful faction in Rome) of certain ecclesiastics. These bloody revolutions could not but destroy all reverence for their ecclesiastical rulers in the people of Rome.[g]

CHARLES KINGSLEY ON TEMPORAL POWER

A united Italy suited the views of the popes then no more than it does now. Not only did they conceive of Rome as still the centre of the western world, but more, their stock in trade was at Rome. The chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and St. Paul, the catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable martyrs--these were their stock in trade. By giving these, selling these, working miracles with these, calling pilgrims from all parts of Christendom to visit these in situ, they kept up their power and their wealth.

Having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and Charlemagne, it was still their interest to pursue the same policy; to compound for their own independence, as they did with Charlemagne and his successors, by defending the pretences of foreign kings to the sovereignty of the rest of Italy. This has been their policy for centuries. It is their policy still; and that policy has been the curse of Italy. This fatal gift of the patrimony of St. Peter--as Dante saw, as Machiavelli saw, as all clear-sighted Italians have seen--has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable as the hierophant of a priestly caste to unite his people in the bonds of national life; unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself, and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in the balance of power, the pope was forced, again and again, to keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and calling in foreign arms; and the bane of Italy, from the time of Stephen III to that of Pius IX, was the temporal power of the pope. But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came. In building their power on the Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter, they had built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.

Having committed themselves to the false position of being petty kings of a petty kingdom, they had to endure continual treachery and tyranny from their foreign allies--to see not merely Italy, but Rome itself, insulted and even sacked by faithful Catholics, and to become more and more, as the centuries rolled on, the tools of those very kings whom they had wished to make their tools.

True, they defended themselves long, and with astonishing skill and courage. Their sources of power were two, the moral and the thaumaturgic, and they used them both; but when the former failed, the latter became useless. As long as their moral power was real; as long as they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous faults, the best men in Europe, so long the people believed in them, and in their thaumaturgic relics likewise. But they became by no means the best men in Europe. Then they began to think that after all it was more easy to work the material than the moral power--easier to work the bones than to work righteousness. They were deceived. Behold! when the righteousness was gone, the bones refused to work. People began to question the virtue of the bones, and to ask, “We can believe that the bones may have worked miracles for good men, but for bad men? We will examine whether they work any miracles at all.” And then, behold, it came out that the bones did not work miracles, and that possibly they were not saints’ bones at all; and then the storm came; and the lie, as all lies do, punished itself. That salt had lost its savour. They who had been the light of Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a warning to mankind until the end of time, that on truth and virtue depends the only abiding strength.[h]

FOOTNOTES

[91] Another ecclesiastic of the same name was elected by the people immediately after the death of Zacharias; but he did not live to enjoy his elevation. On the third morning after his election he was struck with apoplexy, and as he had not been consecrated, he is sometimes omitted in the pontifical calendar. See Platina,[i] p. 152, and Fleury.[j] Baronius[k] appears to say that the omission of his name is wrong.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. THE HIGH NOON OF THE PAPACY

[Sidenote: [985-1305 A.D.]]

During the minority of Otto III the Tuscan party exercised undisputed sway in Rome, without any check from without. No sooner was Otto II dead than Boniface VII reappeared from exile, and having seized his rival John XIV, and put him to death by starvation, for two years occupied unresisted the papal chair. Nevertheless Boniface VII was not a friend of the Tuscan party. By the people his dead body was treated with insults. Boniface’s successor, John XV, not proving as pliant as Crescentius the consul desired, was driven from Rome and reduced to the necessity of again appealing to the imperial authority. He was permitted to return.[b]

At his death, Otto III obliged the clergy and the people to elect his nephew Bruno, a German, and only twenty years of age. But the chief control of the city was at present in the hands of the senator Crescentius (Cencius), a man whom the emperor could not fail to view with feelings of fear and jealousy. On visiting Rome, therefore, for the purpose of receiving consecration, he undertook measures for his expulsion; but was prevented from putting them in practice by the persuasions of his nephew, who had assumed the appellation of Gregory V. The clemency of the pontiff was ill rewarded. Crescentius, on the departure of the emperor, drove him from the city and bestowed the pontifical dignity on a Greek, who took the name of John XVI. Gregory in the meantime fled into Lombardy; and, having summoned the several bishops to meet him at Pavia, he there excommunicated both Crescentius and John, his sentence, it is said, being supported by nearly all Italy, Germany, and France. The emperor, on his part, lost no time in proceeding to the capital, where his appearance struck instant terror into the hearts of the guilty Romans. John was apprehended when on the point of leaving the city; and the officers of the emperor, dreading lest their master should show any forbearance towards the culprit, immediately tore out his tongue and his eyes. Crescentius suffered the gentler punishment of decapitation; and Gregory, thus freed from his enemies, retained the papal dignity till the year 999. He was succeeded by Gerbert, archbishop of Ravenna, whom Otto caused to be elected in gratitude for the services he had rendered him as his instructor.[c]

THE DREAM OF OTTO III

[Sidenote: [999-1046 A.D.]]

The emperor was victorious, and exercised undisputed sway in the city of the cæsars. At this moment a grand scheme rose before his mental vision. Rome was to occupy again her ancient place as the seat of empire. An emperor was to sit on the throne of Constantine who would govern like Constantine, and raise the empire once more to the pinnacle of power. A truly apostolic pope was to be appointed, a second Silvester who would reform the clergy and correct the infamous avarice and vice of the Roman church.

On the death of Gregory V that scheme seemed about to be realised. The decree issued by Otto III for the election of his tutor Gerbert, who assumed the name of Silvester II, in allusion to the relations of Constantine and Silvester I, declared Rome to be the capital of the world, the Roman church to be the mother of churches; it described how the dignity of the Roman church had been obscured by her neglectful popes, how the property of the church had been squandered on the dregs of mankind, how the prelates had made everything venal, and so despoiled the very altars of the apostles. It denounced the donations of Constantine and Charles the Bald as void and forgeries; it assumed the power not only of electing, but, by God’s grace, of creating and ordaining the pope, and it granted eight counties for his support. The millennial period of the Christian era was to see all old abuses swept away, and the new régime established. The new age was to begin with a new Constantine and a new Silvester. The year 1000 was to inaugurate the change. But how vain are the schemes of men! The looked-for year came. It found Otto III indeed at Rome, with a palace built on the Aventine, with a regular administrative system for the government of the capital established. It found his tutor, Silvester II, on the chair of St. Peter to second and direct him. Before three years both of them were dead.

The death of Otto put an end to all attempts at reform. For none but Otto in that lawless age rose above his surroundings, to project a new era of improvement. None but his tutor, Silvester II, could sympathise with his projects. When, comet-like, these two luminaries had darted across the heaven and disappeared, the darkness of night grew thicker than before.[b]

With the disappearance of these two eminent men the popedom relapsed into its former degradation. The feudal nobility--that very “refuse” which, to use the expression of a contemporary writer, it had been Otto’s mission “to sweep from the capital”--regained their ascendency, and the popes became as completely the instruments of their will as they had once been of that of the Eastern emperor. A leading faction among this nobility was that of the counts of Tusculum, and for nearly half a century the popedom was a mere appanage in their family. As if to mark their contempt for the office, they carried the election of Theophylact, the son of Count Alberic, a lad scarcely twelve years of age, to the office. Benedict IX (1033-1045), such was the title given him, soon threw off even the external decencies of his office, and his pontificate was disgraced by every conceivable excess. As he grew to manhood his rule, in conjunction with that of his brother, who was appointed the patrician or prefect of the city, resembled that of two captains of banditti. The scandal attaching to his administration culminated when it was known that, in order to win the hand of a lady for whom he had conceived a passion, he had sold the pontifical office itself to another member of the Tusculan house, John, the arch-presbyter, who took the name of Gregory VI (1045-1046). His brief pontificate was chiefly occupied with endeavours to protect the pilgrims to Rome on their way to the capital from the lawless freebooters (who plundered them of their costly votive offerings as well as of their personal property), and with attempts to recover by main force the alienated possessions of the Roman church. Prior, however, to his purchase of the pontifical office, the citizens of Rome, weary of the tyranny and extortions of Benedict, had assembled of their own accord and elected another pope, John, bishop of Sabina, who took the name of Silvester III (rival pope, 1044-1046).

[Sidenote: [1044-1054 A.D.]]

In the meantime Benedict had been brought back to Rome by his powerful kinsmen, and now reclaimed the sacred office. For a brief period, therefore, there were to be seen three rival popes, each denouncing the other’s pretensions and combating them by armed force. But even in Rome the sense of decency and shame had not become altogether extinguished; and at length a party in the Roman church deputed Peter, their archdeacon, to carry a petition to the emperor Henry III, soliciting his intervention. The emperor, a man of deep religious feeling and lofty character, responded to the appeal. He had long noted, in common with other thoughtful observers, the widespread degeneracy which, taking example by the curia, was growing throughout the church at large, and especially visible in concubinage and simony, alike regarded as mortal sins in the clergy. He forthwith crossed the Alps and assembled a council at Sutri. The claims of the three rival popes were each in turn examined and pronounced invalid, and a German, Suidger (Suidgar or Suger), bishop of Bamberg, was elected to the office as Clement II (1046-1047).

THE GERMAN POPES

The degeneracy of the church at this period would seem to have been in some degree compensated by the reform of the monasteries, and from the great abbey of Cluny in Burgundy there now proceeded a line of German popes who in a great measure restored the dignity and reputation of their office. But, whether from the climate, always ill adapted to the German constitution, or from poison, as the contemporary chronicles not unfrequently suggest, it is certain that their tenure of office was singularly brief. Clement II died before the close of the year of his election. Damasus II, his successor, held the office only twenty-three days. Leo IX, who succeeded, held it for the exceptionally lengthened period of more than five years (1049-1054). This pontiff, although a kinsman and nominee of the emperor, refused to ascend the throne until his election had been ratified by the voice of the clergy and the people, and his administration of the office presented the greatest possible contrast to that of Benedict IX or Sergius III.

[Sidenote: [1049-1064 A.D.]]

In more than one respect it constitutes a crisis in the history of the popedom. In conjunction with his faithful friend and adviser, the great Hildebrand, he projected schemes of fundamental church reform, in which the suppression of simony and of married life (or concubinage, as it was styled by its denouncers) on the part of the clergy formed the leading features. In the year 1049, at three great synods successively convened at Rome, Rheims, and Mainz, new canons condemnatory of the prevailing abuses were enacted, and the principles of monasticism more distinctly asserted in contravention of those traditional among the secular clergy. Leo’s pontificate closed, however, ingloriously.

In an evil hour he ventured to oppose the occupation by the Normans, whose encroachments on Italy were just commencing. His ill-disciplined forces were no match for the Norman bands, composed of the best warriors of the age. He was himself made prisoner, detained for nearly a twelvemonth in captivity, and eventually released only to die, a few days after, of grief and humiliation. But, although his own career terminated thus ignominiously, the services rendered by Leo to the cause of Roman Catholicism were great and permanent; and of his different measures none contributed more effectually to the stability of his see than the formation of the college of cardinals.

THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS

The title of “cardinal” was not originally restricted to dignitaries connected with the church of Rome, but it had hitherto been a canonical requirement that all who attained to this dignity should have passed through the successive lower ecclesiastical grades in connection with one and the same foundation; the cardinals attached to the Roman church had consequently been all Italians, educated for the most part in the capital, having but little experience of the world beyond its walls, and incapable of estimating church questions in the light of the necessities and feelings of Christendom at large. By the change which he introduced, Leo summoned the leaders of the party of reform within the newly constituted college of cardinals, and thus attached to his office a body of able advisers with wider views and less narrow sympathies. By their aid the administration of the pontifical duties was rendered at once more easy and more effective.

The pontiff himself was liberated from his bondage to the capital, and, even when driven from Rome, could still watch over the interests of both his see and the entire church in all their extended relations; and the popedom must now be looked upon as entering upon another stage in its history--that of almost uninterrupted progress to the pinnacle of power. According to Anselm[o] of Lucca, it was during the pontificate of Leo, at the synod of Rheims above referred to, that the title of “apostolic bishop” (apostolicus) was first declared to belong to the pope of Rome exclusively.

The short pontificate of Nicholas II (1059-1061) is memorable chiefly for the fundamental change then introduced in the method of electing to the papal office. By a decree of the Second Lateran Council (1059), the nomination to the office was vested solely in the cardinal bishops--the lower clergy, the citizens, and the emperor retaining simply the right of intimating or withholding their assent. It was likewise enacted that the nominee should always be one of the Roman clergy, unless indeed no eligible person could be found among their number. At the same time the direst anathemas were decreed against all who should venture to infringe this enactment either in the letter or the spirit.

The preponderance thus secured to the ultramontane party and to Italian interests must be regarded as materially affecting the whole subsequent history of the popedom. The manner in which it struck at the imperial influence was soon made apparent in the choice of Nicholas’ successor, the line of German popes being broken through by the election of Anselm, bishop of Lucca (the uncle of the historian), who ascended the pontifical throne as Alexander II (1061-1073) without having received the sanction of the emperor. His election was forthwith challenged by the latter, and for the space of two years the Roman state was distracted by a civil war, Honorius II being supported as a rival candidate by the imperial arms, while Alexander maintained his position only with the support of the Norman levies. The respective merits of their claims were considered at a council convened at Mantua, and the decision was given in favour of Alexander. Cadalous, such was the name of his rival, did not acknowledge the justice of the sentence, but he retired into obscurity; and the remainder of Alexander’s pontificate, though troubled by the disputes respecting a married clergy, was free from actual warfare. In these much vexed questions of church discipline Alexander, who had been mainly indebted for his election to Hildebrand, the archdeacon of the Roman church, was guided entirely by that able churchman’s advice, and in 1073 Hildebrand himself succeeded to the office as Gregory VII (1073-1085).[d]

MILMAN ON THE MISSION OF THE PAPACY

[Sidenote: [1064-1073 A.D.]]

Hildebrand was now pope; the great contest for the dominion over the human mind, the strife between the temporal and spiritual power, which had been carried on for some centuries as a desultory and intermitting warfare, was now to be waged boldly, openly, implacably, to the subjugation of one or of the other. Sacerdotal, or rather papal Christianity, had not yet fulfilled its mission, for, the papal control withdrawn, the sacerdotal rule would have lost its unity, and with its unity its authority must have dissolved away. Without the clergy, not working here and there with irregular and uncombined excitement on the religious feelings of man, awakening in one quarter a vigorous enthusiasm, while in other parts of Europe men were left to fall back into some new Christian heathenism, or into an inert habitual Christianity of form; without the whole order labouring on a fixed and determined system, through creeds sanctified by ancient reverence and a ceremonial guarded by rigid usage; without this vast uniform, hierarchical influence, where, in those ages of anarchy and ignorance, of brute force and dormant intelligence, had been Christianity itself? And looking only to its temporal condition, what had the world been without Christianity?

The papacy has still the more splendid part of its destiny to accomplish. It has shown vital power enough to recover from its seemingly irrecoverable degradation. It might have been supposed that a moral and religious deprivation so profound, would utterly have destroyed that reverence of opinion which was the one groundwork of the papal power. The veil had been raised; and Italy at least, if not Europe, had seen within it, not a reflex of divine majesty and holiness, but an idol not only hideous to the pure moral sentiment, but contemptible for its weakness. If centuries of sanctity had planted deeply in the heart of man his veneration for the successor of St. Peter, it would have been paralysed (the world might expect) and extinguished by more than a century of odious and unchristian vices. A spiritual succession must be broken and interrupted by such unspiritual inheritors. Could the head of Christendom, living in the most unchristian wickedness, perpetuate his descent, and hand down the patrimony of power and authority, with nothing of that piety and goodness which was at least one of his titles to that transcendent power?

But that idea or that opinion would not have endured for centuries, had it not possessed strength enough to reconcile its believers to contradictions and inconsistencies. With all the Teutonic part of Latin Christendom, the belief in the supremacy of the pope was coeval with their Christianity; it was an article of their original creed as much as the redemption; their apostles were commissioned by the pope; to him they humbly looked for instruction and encouragement, even almost for permission to advance upon their sacred adventure. Augustine, Boniface, Ebbo, Anskar, had been papal missionaries. If the faith of Italy was shaken by too familiar a view of that which the Germans contemplated with more remote and indistinct veneration, the national pride, in Rome especially, accepted the spiritual as a compensation for the loss of the temporal supremacy; it had ceased to be the centre of the imperial, it would not endure not to be that of ecclesiastical dominion. The jealousy of a pope elected, or even born, elsewhere than in Italy, showed the vitality of that belief in the papacy, which was belied by so many acts of violence towards individual popes.

The religious minds would be chiefly offended by the incongruity between the lives and the station of the pope; but to them it would be a part of religion to suppress any rebellious doubts. Their souls were deeply impressed with the paramount necessity of the unity of the church; to them the papacy was of divine appointment, the pope the successor of St. Peter; all secret questioning of this integral part of their implanted faith was sin. However then they might bow down in shame and sorrow at the inscrutable decrees of heaven, in allowing its vicegerent thus to depart from his original brightness, yet they would veil their faces in awe, and await in trembling patience the solution of that mystery. In the Christian mind in general, or rather the mind within the world of Christendom, the separation between Christian faith and Christian morality was almost complete. Christianity was a mere unreasoning assent to certain dogmatic truths, an unreasoning obedience to certain ceremonial observances.

Controversy was almost dead. In the former century, the predestinarian doctrines of Gottschalk, in general so acceptable to the popular ear, had been entirely suppressed by the sacerdotal authority. The tenets of Berengar concerning the presence of Christ in the Sacrament, had been restrained, and were to be once more restrained, by the same strong hand; and Berengar’s logic was beyond his age. The Manichæan doctrines of the Paulicians and kindred sects were doubtless spreading to a great extent among the lower orders, but as yet in secrecy, breaking out now in one place, now in another, yet everywhere beheld with abhorrence, creating no wide alarm, threatening no dangerous disunion. In all the vulgar of Christendom (and that vulgar comprehended all orders, all ranks) the moral sentiment, as more obtuse, would be less shocked by that incongruity which grieved and oppressed the more religious. The great body of Christians in the West would no more have thought of discussing the character of the pope than the attributes of God. He was to them the apostle, the vicegerent of God, enveloped in the same kind of awful mystery. They feared the thunders of the Lateran as those of heaven; and were no more capable of sound discrimination as to the limits, grounds, and nature of that authority than as to the causes of the destructive fire from the clouds. Their general belief in the judgment to come was not more deeply rooted than in the right of the clergy, more especially the head of the clergy, to anticipate, to declare, or to ratify their doom.

The German line of pontiffs had done much to reinvest the papacy in its ancient sanctity. The Italian Alexander II had been at least a blameless pontiff, and now every qualification which could array the pope in imposing majesty, in what bordered on divine worship, seemed to meet in Gregory VII. His life verified the splendid panegyric with which he had been presented by Cardinal Hugo to the Roman people. He had the austerest virtue, the most simple piety, the fame of vast theologic knowledge, the tried ability to rule men, intrepidity which seemed to delight in confronting the most powerful; a stern singleness of purpose, which, under its name of churchmanship, gave his partisans unlimited reliance on his firmness and resolution, and yet a subtle policy which bordered upon craft. To them his faults were virtues; his imperiousness the due assertion of his dignity; his unbounded ambition zeal in God’s cause; no haughtiness could be above that which became his station. The terror by which he ruled (he was so powerful that he could dispense with love), as it was the attribute of the divinity now exclusively worshipped by man, so was it that which became the representative of God on earth.

The first, the avowed object of Gregory’s pontificate, was the absolute independence of the clergy, of the pope, of the great prelates throughout Latin Christendom, down to the lowest functionary, whose person was to become sacred; that independence under which lurked the undisguised pretension to superiority. His remote and somewhat more indistinct vision was the foundation of a vast spiritual autocracy in the person of the pope, who was to rule mankind by the consentient but subordinate authority of the clergy throughout the world. For this end the clergy were to become still more completely a separate, inviolable caste; their property equally sacred with their persons. Each in his separate sphere, the pope above all and comprehending all, was to be sovereign arbiter of all disputes; to hold in his hands the supreme mediation in questions of war and peace; to adjudge contested successions to kingdoms; to be a great feudal lord, to whom other kings became beneficiaries. His own arms were to be chiefly spiritual, but the temporal power was to be always ready to execute the ecclesiastical behest against the ungodly rebels who might revolt from its authority; nor did the churchman refuse altogether to sanction the employment of secular weapons, to employ armies in his own name, or even to permit the use of arms to the priesthood.

For this complete isolation of the hierarchy into a peculiar and inviolable caste was first necessary the reformation of the clergy in two most important preliminary matters; the absolute extirpation of the two evils, which the more rigid churchmen had been denouncing for centuries, to the suppression of which Hildebrand had devoted so much of his active energies. The war against simony and the concubinage of the clergy (for under this ill-sounding name was condemned all connection, however legalised, with the female sex), must first be carried to a triumphant issue, before the church could assume its full and uncontested domination.[92]

Simony

Like his predecessors, like all the more high-minded churchmen, Hildebrand refused to see that simony was the inevitable consequence of the inordinate wealth of the clergy. It was a wild moral paradox to attempt to reconcile enormous temporal possessions and enormous temporal power with the extinction of all temporal motives for obtaining, all temptations to the misuse of these all-envied treasures. In the feudal system, which had been so long growing up throughout western Europe, bishops had become, in every respect, the equals of the secular nobles. In every city the bishop, if not the very first of men, was on a level with the first; without the city he was lord of the amplest domains. Archbishops almost equalled kings; for who would not have coveted the station and authority of a Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, rather than the sovereignty of the feeble Carlovingian monarch?

Charlemagne himself had set the example of advancing his natural sons to high ecclesiastical dignities. His feebler descendants, even the more pious, submitted to the same course from choice or necessity. The evil worked downwards. The bishop, who had bought his see, indemnified himself by selling the inferior prebends or cures. What was so intrinsically valuable began to have its money-price; it became an object of barter and sale. The layman who purchased holy orders bought usually peace, security of life, comparative ease. Those who aspired to higher dignities soon repaid themselves for the outlay, however large and extortionate. The highest bishops confessed their own guilt; the bishopric of Rome had too often been notoriously bought and sold.

According to the strict law, the clergy could receive everything, alienate nothing. But the frequent and bitter complaints of the violent usurpation, or the fraudulent alienation by the clergy themselves of what had been church property, show that neither party respected this sanctity when it was the interest of both to violate it. While, on the one hand, the clergy extorted from the dying prince or noble some important grant, immunity, or possession, the despoiled heir would scruple at no means of resuming his alienated rights or property. The careless, the profligate, the venal, the warlike bishop or abbot, would find means, if he found advantage, to elude the law; to surrender gradually and imperceptibly; to lease out the land so as to annihilate its value to the church; to grant in perpetuity for trifling compensations or for valueless service the coveted estate; and so to relax the inexorable grasp of the church. His own pomp and expenditure would reduce the ecclesiastic to the wants and subterfuges of debtors and of bankrupts; and so the estates would, directly or circuitously, return either to the original or to some new owner.

Celibacy of the Clergy

With this universal simony was connected, more closely than may at first appear, the other great vice of the age, as it was esteemed by Hildebrand and his school, the marriage of the clergy. The celibacy of the clergy was necessary to their existence, at the present period, as a separate caste. Hereditary succession and the degeneracy of the order were inseparable. Great as were the evils inevitable from the dominion of the priesthood, if it had become in any degree the privilege of certain families, that evil would have been enormously aggravated, the compensating advantages annulled. Family affections and interests would have been constantly struggling against those of the church. One universal nepotism, a nepotism not of kindred but of parentage, would have preyed upon the vital energies of the order. Every irreligious occupant would either have endeavoured to alienate to his lay descendants the property of the church, or bred up his still more degenerate descendants in the certainty of succession to their patrimonial benefice.

Celibacy may be maintained for a time by mutual control and awe; by severe discipline; by a strong corporate spirit in a monastic community. But in a low state of morals as to sexual intercourse, in an order recruited from all classes of society, not filled by men of tried and matured religion; in an order crowded by aspirants after its wealth, power, comparative ease, privileges, immunities, public estimation; in an order superior to, or dictating public opinion (if public opinion made itself heard); in a permanent order, in which the degeneracy of one age would go on increasing in the next, till it produced some stern reaction; in an order comparatively idle, without social duties or intellectual pursuits; in an order not secluded in the desert, but officially brought into the closest and most confidential relations as instructors and advisers of the other sex, it was impossible to maintain real celibacy; and the practical alternative lay between secret marriage, concubinage without the form of marriage, or a looser and more corrupting intercourse between the sexes.

Throughout Latin Christendom, throughout the whole spiritual realm of Hildebrand, he could not but know there had been long a deep murmured, if not an avowed doubt, as to the authority of the prohibitions against the marriage of the clergy; where the dogmatic authority of the papal canons was not called in question, there was a bold resistance or a tacit infringement of the law. Italy has been seen in actual, if uncombined, rebellion from Calabria to the Alps. The whole clergy of the kingdom of Naples has appeared, under Nicholas II, from the highest to the lowest, openly living with their lawful wives. The married clergy were still, if for the present cowed, a powerful faction throughout Italy; they were awaiting their time of vengeance. The memory of the married pope, Adrian II, was but recent.

In Germany the power and influence of the married clergy will make itself felt, if less openly proclaimed, as a bond of alliance with the emperor and the Lombard prelates. The French councils denounce the crime as frequent, notorious. Among the Anglo-Saxon clergy before Dunstan, marriage was rather the rule, celibacy the exception.

GREGORY’S SYNOD AT ROME

[Sidenote: [1073-1074 A.D.]]

Almost the first public act of Gregory VII was a declaration of implacable war against these his two mortal enemies, simony and the marriage of the clergy. He was no infant Hercules; but the mature ecclesiastical Hercules would begin his career by strangling these two serpents--the brood, as he esteemed them, and parents of all evil. The decree of the synod held in Rome (March 9th, 10th, 1074) in the eleventh month of his pontificate is not extant, but in its inexorable provisions it went beyond the sternest of his predecessors. It absolutely invalidated all sacraments performed by simoniacal or married priests; baptism was no regenerating rite; it might almost seem that the eucharistic bread and wine in their unhallowed hands refused to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. The communicants guilty of perseverance at least in the sin shared in the sacerdotal guilt. Even the priesthood was startled at this new and awful doctrine, that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on their own sinlessness. Gregory, in his headstrong zeal, was promulgating a doctrine used afterwards by Wycliffe and his followers with such tremendous energy. And this was a fearless, democratical provocation to the people; for it left to notoriety, to public fame, to fix on anyone the brand of the hidden sin of simony, or (it might be the calumnious) charge of concubinage; and so abandoned the holy priesthood to the judgment of the multitude.[93]

But the extirpation of these two internal enemies to the dignity and the power of the sacerdotal order was far below the holy ambition of Gregory; this was but clearing the ground for the stately fabric of his theocracy. If, for his own purposes, he had at first assumed some moderation in his intercourse with the empire, over the rest of Latin Christendom he took at once the tone and language of a sovereign. We must rapidly survey, before we follow him into his great war with the empire, Gregory VII asserting his autocracy over the rest of Latin Christendom.

[Sidenote: [1074-1076 A.D.]]

His letters to Philip I, king of France, are in the haughtiest, most criminatory terms: “No king has reached such a height of detestable guilt in oppressing the churches of his kingdom as Philip of France.” He puts the king to the test; his immediate admission of a bishop of Mâcon, elected by the clergy and people, without payment to the crown. Either let the king repudiate this base traffic of simony, and allow fit persons to be promoted to bishoprics, or the Franks, unless apostates from Christianity, will be struck with the sword of excommunication, and refuse any longer to obey him.

Hildebrand’s predecessor (and Alexander II did no momentous act without the counsel of Hildebrand) had given a direct sanction to the Norman conquest of England. Hildebrand may have felt some admiration, even awe, of the congenial mind of the conqueror. He advances the claim to Peter’s pence over the kingdom. William admits this claim; it was among the stipulations, it was the price which the pope had imposed for his assent to the conquest. But to the demand of fealty, the conqueror returns an answer of haughty brevity: “I have not sworn, nor will I swear fealty which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours.” And William maintained his Teutonic independence--created bishops and abbots at his will, was absolute lord over his ecclesiastical as over his feudal liegemen.

To the kings of Spain, in one of his earliest letters, Pope Gregory boldly asserts that the whole realm of Spain is not only within the spiritual jurisdiction of the holy see, but her property. No part of Latin Christendom was so remote or so barbarous as to escape his vigilant determination to bring it under his vast ecclesiastical unity. While yet a deacon he had corresponded with Sweyn, king of Denmark; on him he bestows much grave and excellent advice. In a letter to Olaf, king of Norway, he dissuades him solemnly from assisting the rebellious brothers of the Danish king. Between the duke of Poland and the king of the Russians he interposes his mediation. The son of the Russian had come to Rome to receive his kingdom from the hands of St. Peter. The kingdom of Hungary, as that of Spain, he treats as a fief of the papacy; he rebukes the king Solomon for daring to hold it as a benefice of the king of the Germans. He watches over Bohemia; his legates take under their care the estates of the church; he summons the archbishop of Prague to Rome. Even Africa is not beyond the care of Hildebrand. The clergy and people of Carthage are urged to adhere to their archbishop--not to dread the arms of the Saracens, though that once flourishing Christian province, the land of Cyprian and Augustine, is so utterly reduced that three bishops cannot be found to proceed to a legitimate consecration.

But the empire was the one worthy, one formidable antagonist to Hildebrand’s universal theocracy, whose prostration would lay the world beneath his feet. The empire must acknowledge itself as a grant from the papacy, as a grant revocable for certain offences against the ecclesiastical rights and immunities; it must humbly acquiesce in the uncontrolled prerogative of the cardinals to elect the pope; abandon all the imperial claims on the investiture of the prelates and other clergy with their benefices; release the whole mass of church property from all feudal demands, whether of service or of fealty; submit patiently to rebuke; admit the pope to dictate on questions of war and peace, and all internal government where he might detect, or suppose that he detected, oppression. This was the condition to which the words and acts of Gregory aspired to reduce the heirs of Charlemagne, the successors of the western cæsars.

As a Christian, as a member of the church, the emperor was confessedly subordinate to the pope, the acknowledged head and ruler of the church. As a subject of the empire, the pope owed temporal allegiance to the emperor. The authority of each depended on loose and flexible tradition, on variable and contradictory precedents, on titles of uncertain signification; each could ascend to a time when they were not dependent upon each other. The emperor boasted himself the successor to the whole autocracy of the cæsars, to Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne: the pope to that of St. Peter, or of Christ himself.[e] But all-powerful as was the pope abroad, in Italy his authority was restricted. Even in Rome the prefect Cencius dared to lay hands on Gregory VII, to tear him from the sanctuary of a church during a riot, and afterwards held him some time a prisoner. At Milan the citizens expelled Herlembald and his tool Atto, who exercised actual tyranny in the city under pretext of carrying out the pope’s reforms, and demanded an archbishop of Henry IV, who sent them a noble from Castiglione. This was the commencement of the struggle between sacerdotal and imperial power that culminated in one of the greatest and most stirring dramas of all history.

Events began auspiciously for Gregory, many points of support being promised him in Germany. Feudal rebellions had kept that country in a state of agitation during the minority of Henry IV, who was but six years old when his father died in 1056. The regency and even the person of the young king had been wrested from the empress Agnes by the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria. Once arrived at man’s estate, Henry IV set about suppressing the revolt that had, as usual, arisen among the Saxons. An important victory won in Thuringia seemed to promise him a continuance of success, when suddenly the voice of the pope thundered down upon him, ordering him, with unexampled audacity, to suspend all warlike operations, and to leave to the holy see the right of decision in his quarrel with the Saxons; furthermore, to abandon all pretensions to ecclesiastical investiture, under pain of excommunication. To this the legates joined the summons to appear at Rome to answer certain personal charges that had been brought against him. Henry IV replied to this furious attack with equal vigour, and in the synod of Worms, composed of eighteen prelates, his partisans, he caused sentence of deposition solemnly to be pronounced against Gregory VII (1076).

[Sidenote: [1076-1077 A.D.]]

This decree, instead of alarming the pope, but excited him to fresh aggression. No sooner was he delivered by a popular movement from the hands of his enemy, Cencius, the Roman prefect, than he began once more to thunder forth denunciations; he hurled a bull of excommunication at the emperor, in which he proclaimed him a rebel to the holy see, and declared his vassals free from all allegiance to him. This bull was mercilessly put into execution by the Saxons and Swabians, all enemies of the house of Franconia. At their head was Rudolf of Swabia and the Italian, Welf, of the house of Este, whom Henry himself had created duke of Bavaria. They convoked a diet at Tribur, suspended the functions of the emperor and menaced him with deposition if he did not win absolution from the curse of Rome. Henry acceded humbly, and promised to assemble a general diet at Augsburg, which he begged the pope to attend for the purpose of absolving him. Alive, however, to the danger of allowing his enemies to come together in a body, he resolved to anticipate the action of the proposed diet and went himself to Italy to implore pardon of the pope.

The price Gregory set upon this absolution was such as no other monarch ever had to pay. The pope was inhabiting at the time the château of Canossa, in the domains of the celebrated countess Matilda, a devout adherent of the holy see and the most powerful sovereign in Italy, since she included among her possessions the marquisates of Tuscany and Spoleto, Parma, Piacenza, and several points in Lombardy, the Marches, etc. Henry IV came to this castle to solicit an audience, but was compelled to wait barefooted in the snow three days before he was received. At last on the fourth day he was admitted and given absolution. Gregory, however, too adroit to lay down arms at once, refused to decide the question relative to the German crown, and deferred all consideration of it to a special diet, thereby reserving to himself a means of throwing Henry into fresh embarrassment. Could the king do other than tremble before a man who was the acknowledged representative of divinity on earth, and who believed himself so secure in the favour of heaven that, taking half of a “host,” he adjured God upon it to annihilate him instantly if he were guilty of the crimes imputed to him? When he presented the second half of the “host” to the king, asking him to swear a similar oath, Henry shrank back affrighted (1077).

By this timely bowing of the head Henry IV avoided the blow that was about to be aimed at him by a coalition of his enemies; the moment of danger once passed, he straightened up like a bow relieved from tension. Indeed he had no alternative save definitively to relinquish his hopes of the crown or again to risk all upon a single chance, since the German rebels had undertaken to answer the question left open by Gregory, and had appointed to the throne Rudolf of Swabia, who had purchased the protection of the legates by promising to abjure investiture (1077), and had been solemnly acknowledged by the pope.

[Sidenote: [1077-1125 A.D.]]

Having gathered around himself a body of partisans, Henry IV began to wage war with success. The battle of Wolksheim, in which Rudolf was slain by the hand of Godfrey de Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, who carried the imperial standard, made him master of Germany (1080). He determined to repeat this success in Italy, where a victory won by his son had already paved the way; and the countess Matilda was stripped of a part of her possessions, Rome was taken, and the archbishop of Ravenna was appointed pope under the name of Clement III. Gregory himself would have fallen into the hands of the man he had so deeply outraged, had not Robert Guiscard and his Normans, faithful allies of the holy see, come to his rescue. He died among them (1085) with the words: “For no other reason than that I have loved justice and pursued iniquity, I must die in exile.”

Up to the final moment he appeared to believe that universal dominance was an inalienable right of the holy see, and his idea was certainly not devoid of logic.

Gregory’s death came too soon; had he lived a few years longer he would have seen his enemy expire in a condition far more miserable than that in which he had been placed at Canossa. Urban II, made pope in 1088, found his main support in the Normans, and conferred upon Roger, duke of Sicily, the title of king. He revealed the papacy in all its grandeur on the occasion of the First Crusade, and revived most of Gregory’s old judgments against the emperor. After a transitory triumph Henry IV was successively attacked by his two sons, whom the church had armed against him, and after having been stripped of all the imperial insignia, was made prisoner by his younger son. In vain he invoked the succour of the king of France, who had been his “most faithful friend”; all help was refused him, and he was reduced to soliciting the post of under-choir-master in a church, “having a considerable knowledge of music.” He died in 1106 at Liège in the depths of poverty, calling down the “vengeance of God upon the parricide”; and his body remained five years without sepulture.

It was, however, this very parricidal son Henry V who at last put a stop to the quarrels resulting from the vexed question of investitures. The decision was retarded some time by the opening of the succession of Countess Matilda, who had bequeathed all her estates to the holy see. Henry laid claim to the entire inheritance, to the fiefs as sovereign of the empire, to the allodial lands as the countess’ nearest heir, and succeeded in entering upon possession of them all. As can readily be believed, this was a cause for fresh dissension in the future. The opening dispute being provisorily settled, the two sides, recognising that a struggle would but weaken them while it confirmed the independence of the feudal lords and of the Italian middle classes, resolved to close the matter by an equitable and, as nearly as possible, an equal division of the rights under dispute. The Concordat of Worms (1122) was couched in the following terms: “I agree,” said Pope Calixtus II to the emperor, “that the elections of the bishops and abbots of the Teutonic kingdom shall take place without violence or simony in your presence, so that in case any difference shall arise you can give your sanction and protection to the side having greater holiness, according to the judgment of the metropolitan and the co-provincials. The elect shall receive from you the prerogatives of his office, and, except that duty that he owes the Roman church, shall render you obedience in all things.”

“I remit to the pope,” said the king, “all right to confer investiture by ring and cross, and in the churches of my kingdom and my empire, I authorise canonical elections and free consecration.” This wise compromise, which vested the temporal and spiritual power respectively in the temporal and spiritual rulers, was accompanied by words of reconciliation. But the design of Gregory VII was not yet fulfilled; the tie of vassalage that united the clergy to the prince was by no means severed, and church remained a part of the state in its main portion at least, if not in its outlying members.

The house of Franconia became extinct with Henry V (1125) after having, by a provisory issue, dissolved the rivalry that existed between the papacy and the empire. The reign of Lothair II, successor of Henry V, was like an interlude between two acts of a drama; during the pause the stage was cleared and reset for the scene that was to follow.[f]

BRYCE ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONCORDAT

The Concordat of Worms was in form a compromise designed to spare either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the papacy remained master of the field. The emperor retained but one-half of those rights of investiture which had formerly been his. At any moment his sceptre might be shivered in his hand by the bolt of anathema, and a host of enemies spring up from every convent and cathedral.

Two other results of this great conflict ought not to pass unnoticed. The emperor was alienated from the church at the most unfortunate of all moments, the end of the Crusades. The religious feeling which the Crusades evoked turned wholly against the opponent of ecclesiastical claims and was made to work the will of the holy see. A century and a half later the pope did not scruple to preach a crusade against the emperor himself.

Again, it was now the first seeds were sown of that fear and hatred wherewith the German people never thenceforth ceased to regard the encroaching Romish court. Branded by the church and forsaken by the nobles, Henry IV retained the affections of the faithful burghers of Worms and Liège. It soon became a test of Teutonic patriotism to resist Italian priestcraft.[g]

RIVAL CLAIMANTS

[Sidenote: [1119-1155 A.D.]]

On the death of Paschal (1118), the bishops of Porto, Ostia, and others elected John of Gaeta, who was chancellor of Rome, to the vacant chair. But his elevation was strongly opposed by the emperor’s minister, Cenzio Frangipani, who, following him to the church where the investiture was to take place, seized him by the throat, and after exposing him to every species of violence from his attendants, dragged him by the hair of the head to his house, and there left him chained, to await the orders of the emperor. He subsequently made his escape to his native place, of which he was made bishop; and Henry, in the meanwhile, raised Maurice Bourdin, by the name of Gregory VIII, to the throne.

Gelasius, as John of Gaeta was called, attempted to recover his dignity, but finding that he could not remain in Italy with safety, fled to Provence, where he died the following year. The anti-pope Gregory, though the way was now open for his accession to the throne, gained no advantage by the death of his rival. Guido, archbishop of Ravenna, a man of considerable powers of mind and vast influence, ascended the papal chair as Calixtus II.[94] The contest which he was obliged to carry on with Gregory ended completely in his favour; and the defeated pretender died, after suffering innumerable miseries,[95] in a monastery. Calixtus himself died shortly after (1124); and his successor, Honorius II, passed a reign of five years in fruitless contention with Roger of Sicily, by whom his troops were entirely defeated. Innocent II and Anacletus II both pretended to the dignity at his death; and the former, before he could establish his sole claim to the prize, had to spend several years as an exile in France.

We pass over the obscure pontificates of his immediate successors. But in 1145, Bernard, abbot of St. Anastasius at Rome, and a favourite disciple of the celebrated saint of the same name, was elected to the see as Eugenius III. But whatever were the virtues of Eugenius, or the credit due to him from his intimacy with a man so full of wisdom and holiness as St. Bernard, the factious spirit which had long prevailed at Rome broke out into new excesses at the period of his elevation. Urged on by the popular eloquence of Arnold of Brescia, they were suddenly inflamed with the desire of restoring the institutions and government of the ancient capital; but the tumult which was commenced with this pretence soon carried its authors to the commission of every species of violence; and the dazzling vision of Rome, restored to its consular dignity, was lost in the clouds and thick darkness which rose from the destruction of some of its finest buildings. Eugenius, by a timely exertion of energy, quelled these disorders; and his return to Rome was attended with all the marks of a triumph. The signs, however, of sedition were still too manifest on the faces of the Romans to allow of his remaining secure among them, and he retired for some time into France. He came back to Italy about the year 1153, and died almost immediately after, at his residence in the town of Tibur.

ADRIAN IV versus BARBAROSSA

[Sidenote: [1155-1158 A.D.]]

The successor of Eugenius was Adrian IV, by birth an Englishman,[96] and strongly characterised by all the ruling passions of the dignified clergy of this age.[97] Frederick Barbarossa had, in the meanwhile, ascended the imperial throne, and his pride and ambition were fitting though dangerous companions for the haughtiness of Adrian. It was not long before an opportunity was afforded these two distinguished men to try the strength of their resolution and principles. Frederick, having been crowned king of the Lombards, hastened towards Rome; but before he arrived at the gate of the city he was met by three cardinals, who acquainted him that the pontiff could not hold any conference with a prince from whom he had as yet received no assurance of obedience and of fidelity to the church. The monarch readily accorded the required professions of allegiance; and a chevalier appointed for the purpose swore solemnly in his name, and on the holy relics, the cross and the Gospel, that he would preserve in safety the life, the liberty, and honour of both the pope and the cardinals. Adrian then intimated his readiness to crown him emperor, and was conducted with great pomp towards the sovereign’s tent.

But here a new cause of contention arose. Frederick had too high a sense of his imperial dignity to manifest any servile complaisance for papal pride. Instead, therefore, of hastening, as some other princes had done, to perform the part of an esquire to the pontiff, he quietly awaited him in his pavilion; which so offended Adrian, that he positively refused to grant him the kiss of peace, till he should perform the humiliating ceremonies to which the pride of churchmen and the pusillanimity of princes had given a species of legitimacy. A whole day was expended in disputing whether the emperor should continue the practice or not. But Adrian was inflexible; and the following morning the haughty Frederick in the presence of his army, purchased the kiss of peace by standing like a menial at the side of the pope’s horse, till he descended and freed him from his degrading situation.

A powerful faction at Rome hailed with joy the approach of Frederick. The desire of limiting the despotism of the pope, and the expectation of drawing large sums as a largess from the imperial treasury, appear to have exercised an almost equal influence on their minds at this time. In their address to Frederick the deputies of this party assumed the station of men who had an unconquered country to present as a free-will offering to the valour and noble qualities of the prince they sought. They had, however, greatly mistaken the ideas of the emperor on the state of Italy. Frederick told them, and with a sternness which presaged a coming storm, that their country had been long and often conquered; that he was truly and lawfully their master. He took possession forthwith of the church of St. Peter (1155), and Adrian placed the imperial crown on the head of the sovereign with far greater willingness than he would have done, had he not seen that his agreement with the prince was now essential to his safety and to the preservation of the church. The populace, finding themselves set at nought by both the pope and the emperor, rose in a mass, and several of the German soldiers fell slaughtered in the aisles of St. Peter. But their death was amply revenged; the emperor attacked the Romans on all sides, and near one thousand citizens paid with their lives the forfeit of their licentiousness or their indiscretion.

Restless and ambitious minds, like those of Adrian and Frederick Barbarossa, could not remain long at peace, when the power and privileges they possessed in their dependence upon each other were so ill defined. The first cause of dispute, after the pacification above related, was a letter which Adrian wrote to the emperor, accusing him of ingratitude for the benefits he had enjoyed through his ministration.

Adrian found it necessary to appease the anger which both Frederick and his subjects expressed at these instances of assumption, and tranquillity was for a brief space restored. But scarcely had the angry feelings generated in the late dispute subsided, when the pontiff again manifested his inclination to oppose the views of the emperor by refusing to confirm the archbishop of Ravenna, whom Frederick had elevated to that station, in his appointment. The fierceness with which the pontiff spoke and wrote on this occasion, threatened Christendom with a rupture as injurious to its peace as that between the unfortunate Henry and Gregory VII. But Frederick’s firmness was unshaken; and a barrier was thus erected against the attempts of the pope, which, intended only as a protection to particular rights, did, in reality, afford support to the universal principles of civil government. To Adrian’s threat that he would deprive him of his crown, he replied that he held his crown, not from him but from his own royal predecessors. “In the days of Constantine,” he asked, “had St. Silvester anything to do with the royal dignity? Yet this was the prince to whom the church was indebted for its peace and its liberty: and all that you enjoy as pope, whence comes it but from the emperors? Render unto God that which is God’s, and to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. Our churches and our cities are shut against your cardinals; because they are not preachers but robbers, they are not peacemakers but plunderers; we see that instead of coming to preach the Gospel and promote peace, their whole desire and endeavour is to amass gold and silver. When we find that they are what the church would have them, we will refuse them nothing good for their support. It is horrible that pride, that monster so detestable, should be able to steal even into the chair of St. Peter.”[c]

ADRIAN’S FIRMNESS

[Sidenote: [1158 A.D.]]

Peace became more hopeless. As a last resource, six cardinals on the part of the pope, and six German bishops on that of the emperor, were appointed to frame a treaty. But the pope demanded the re-establishment of the compact made with his predecessor Eugenius. The imperial bishops reproached the pope with his own violation of that treaty by his alliance with the king of Sicily; the Germans unanimously rejected the demands of the pope: and now the emperor received with favour a deputation from the senate and people of Rome. These ambassadors of the republican party had watched; had been present at the rupture of the negotiations. The pope, with the embers of Arnold’s rebellions mouldering under his feet; with the emperor at the head of all Germany, the prelates as well as the princes; with no ally but the doubtful, often perfidious Norman, stood unshaken; betrayed no misgivings. He threatened the emperor with a public excommunication.

Did the bold sagacity of Adrian foresee the heroic resolution with which Milan and her confederate Lombard cities would many years afterwards, and after some dire reverses and long oppression, resist the power of Barbarossa? Did he calculate with prophetic foresight the strength of Lombard republican freedom? Did he anticipate the field of Legnano, when the whole force of the Teutonic empire was broken before the carroccio of Milan? Already was the secret treaty framed with Milan, Brescia, and Crema. These cities bound themselves not to make peace with the emperor without the consent of the pope and his Catholic successor. Adrian was preparing for the last act of defiance, the open declaration of war, the excommunication of the emperor, which he was pledged to pronounce after the signature of the treaty with the republics, when his death put an end to this strange conflict, where each antagonist was allied with a republican party in the heart of his adversary’s dominions. Adrian IV died at Anagni; his remains were brought to Rome, and interred with the highest honours, and with the general respect if not the grief of the city, in the church of St. Peter. Even the ambassadors of Frederick were present at the funeral. So ended the poor English scholar, at open war with perhaps the mightiest sovereign who had reigned in transalpine Europe since Charlemagne.[e]

TWO RIVAL POPES

[Sidenote: [1158-1164 A.D.]]

The death of Adrian saved the church from the danger which had threatened it during the government of that fierce and overbearing pontiff. But, while delivered from one set of evils, it was surrounded by others little less calculated to injure its interests. The cardinals, having assembled to elect a new pope, chose by a large majority of their body Rolando, a cardinal, and chancellor of the Roman church. Their vote, however, was opposed by Cardinal Octavian, who had expected to be nominated by his colleagues to the vacant dignity; and when Rolando, who assumed the name of Alexander III, was invested with the pontifical cope, he rudely and sacrilegiously pulled it from his shoulders, and, but for the interference of the persons present, would have put it on himself. As he was disappointed in this, he obtained, by signal, a cope of the same kind, which he suddenly threw over his shoulders, placing, in his haste, the hind part before. Loud laughter followed this mistake; but Octavian felt no shame at the mingled ridicule and rebuke with which he was assailed. Going forth from the assembly, which he awed into silence by a band of armed men, he exercised, under the name of Victor IV, the part of sovereign pontiff; and for some days kept Alexander in close confinement.

The emperor Frederick did not look with indifference on these occurrences. A division in the church was equivalent to a great increase in his own power; and he warmly espoused the cause of Octavian, chiefly, as it appears, because he was the head of a faction. He at last, however, summoned a council to consider the question between the rival popes. The council assembled at Pavia, and Octavian was declared pope by the fifty bishops, the numerous abbots, and other dignitaries, of whom the meeting was composed. But Alexander was supported by the whole of that powerful party which contended for the doctrine of papal supremacy; and despising the decree of deposition passed against him at Pavia, he excommunicated the emperor for the part he had taken, and absolved his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Victor, on the other hand, was recognised as lawful pope, not only in Germany, but in England and France; by the monarchs of which countries he was received at Couci on the Loire, with all the pomp and ceremony which had been demanded for his successors by the haughty Adrian.

[Sidenote: [1164-1198 A.D.]]

He died in the year 1164; but the schism was continued by the immediate election of Paschal III, who retained the semblance of authority about three years. Alexander, on the death of Victor, had ventured to return to Rome, which he did not dare to attempt during the life-time of that ecclesiastic. A pestilence, which swept off the flower of Frederick’s army, saved the pope from ruin; and the emperor, obliged as he was to make his escape into Germany as he best might, at length expressed his willingness to heal the schism which he had created in the church. Peace was accordingly restored, and Alexander returned.

On the death of Alexander, Ubaldo, bishop of Ostia, was elected without opposition, and assumed the name of Lucius III (1181-1185), and it has been noted, that at his election the cardinals first appropriated the right of choosing the supreme pontiff without the interference of the people, or of the other orders of the clergy. Popular indignation was loudly expressed. Obliged to seek safety by flight, he called upon the great European states to furnish him with supplies for the support of his rights against the disaffected citizens. His claims were allowed, and the riches of England and other countries were poured freely into his treasury. With these he made head against the insurgents; but such was the fierceness with which they resisted him, that they tore out the eyes of the clergy whom they met beyond the walls of the city; and obliged him to fix his residence at Verona, where he died in 1185. Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III, passed their brief pontificates at a distance from Rome. The last-named pope, however, made peace with the senate and the people; and his successor, Celestine III, was enabled, by the strength of his position, to exercise the most important of his assumed privileges without interruption. Henry VI, who at one time received from his hands[98] the imperial crown, was at another punished by him with the ban of excommunication.[c] On his death he was succeeded by Innocent III.

INNOCENT III

[Sidenote: [1198 A.D.]]

Under Innocent III, the papal power rose to its utmost height.[99] The thirteenth century is nearly commensurate with this supremacy of the pope. Innocent III at its commencement calmly exercised as his right, and handed down strengthened and almost irresistible to his successors, that which, at its close, Boniface asserted with repulsive and ill-timed arrogance, endangered, undermined, and shook to its base.

The essential inherent supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, as of the soul over the body, as of eternity over time, as of Christ over Cæsar, as of God over man, was now an integral part of Christianity. Ideas obtain authority and dominion, not altogether from their intrinsic truth, but rather from their constant asseveration, especially when they fall in with the common hopes and fears, the wants and necessities of human nature. The mass of mankind have neither leisure nor ability to examine them; they fatigue, and so compel the world into their acceptance; more particularly if it is the duty, the passion, and the interest of one great associated body to perpetuate them, while it is neither the peculiar function, nor the manifest advantage of any large class or order to refute them.

The unity of the vast Christian republic was an imposing conception, which, even now that history has shown its hopeless impossibility, still infatuates lofty minds; its impossibility, since it demands for its head not merely that infallibility in doctrine so boldly claimed in later times, but absolute impeccability, in every one of its possessors; more than impeccability, an all-commanding, indefeasible, unquestionable majesty of virtue, holiness, and wisdom. Without this it is a baseless tyranny, a senseless usurpation. In those days it struck in with the whole feudal system, which was one of strict gradation and subordination; to the hierarchy of church and state was equally wanting the crown, the sovereign liege lord.

When this idea was first promulgated in all its naked sternness by Gregory VII, it had come into collision with other ideas rooted with almost equal depth in the mind of man, that especially of the illimitable Cæsarian power, which though transferred to a German emperor, was still a powerful tradition, and derived great weight from its descent from Charlemagne. The humiliation of the emperor was degradation; it brought contempt on the office, scarcely redeemed by the abilities, successes, or even virtues of new sovereigns; the humiliation of the pope was a noble suffering in the cause of God and truth, the depression of patient holiness under worldly violence. In every schism the pope who maintained the loftiest churchmanship had eventually gained the superiority which the imperialising popes had sunk into impotence, obscurity, ignominy.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRUSADES ON PAPAL POWER

[Sidenote: [1198-1201 A.D.]]

The Crusades, as elsewhere described, had made the pope not merely the spiritual, but in some sort the military suzerain of Europe; he had the power of summoning all Christendom to his banner; the raising the cross, the standard of the pope, was throughout Europe a general and compulsory levy, the Heerbann of all who bore arms, of all who could follow an army. That which was a noble act of devotion had become a duty; not to assume the cross was sin and impiety. The Crusades thus became a kind of forlorn hope upon which all the more dangerous and refractory of the temporal sovereigns might be employed, so as to waste their strength, if not lose their lives, by the accidents of the journey, or by the sword of the Mohammedan. If they resisted, the fearful excommunication hung over them, and was ratified by the fears and by the wavering allegiance of their subjects. If they obeyed and returned, as most of them did, with shame and defeat, they returned shorn of their power, lowered in the public estimation, and perhaps still pursued, on account of their ill success, with the inexorable interdict. It was thus by trammelling their adversaries with vows which they could not decline, and from which they could not extricate themselves; by thus consuming their wealth and resources on this wild and remote warfare, that the popes, who themselves decently eluded, or were prevented by age or alleged occupations from embarkation in these adventurous expeditions, broke and wasted away the power and influence of the emperors.

The Crusades, too, had now made the western world tributary to the popedom; the vast subventions raised for the Holy Land were to a certain extent at the disposal of the pope. The taxation of the clergy on his authority could not be refused for such an object; a tenth of all the exorbitant wealth of the hierarchy passed through his hands. An immense financial system grew up; papal collectors were in every land, papal bankers in every capital to transmit these subsidies.

But after all none of these accessory and, in some degree, fortuitous aids, could have raised the papal authority to its commanding height,[100] had it not possessed more sublime and more lawful claims to the reverence of mankind. It was still an assertion of eternal principles of justice, righteousness, and humanity. However it might trample on all justice, sacrifice righteousness to its own interests, plunge Europe in desolating wars, perpetuate strife in states, set sons in arms against their fathers, fathers against sons, it was still proclaiming a higher ultimate end. The papal language, the language of the clergy, was still ostentatiously, profoundly religious; it professed, even if itself did not always respect, even though it tampered with, the awful sense of retribution before an all-knowing, all-righteous God. In his highest pride, the pope was still the servant of the servants of God; in all his cruelty he boasted of his kindness to the transgressor; every contumacious emperor was a disobedient son; the excommunication was the voice of a parent, who affected at least reluctance to chastise.

If this great idea was ever to be realised of a Christian republic with a pope at its head--and that a pope of a high Christian character (in some respects, in all perhaps but one, in tolerance and gentleness almost impossible in his days, and the want of which, far from impairing, confirmed his strength)--none could bring more lofty, more various qualifications for its accomplishment, none could fall on more favourable times than Innocent III. Innocent was Giovanni Lothario Conti, an Italian of noble birth, but not of a family inextricably involved in the petty quarrels and interests of the princedoms of Romagna. He was of the Conti,[101] who derived their name in some remote time from their dignity. The elevation of his uncle to the pontificate as Clement III paved the way to his rapid rise. He was elevated in his twenty-ninth year to the cardinalate under the title vacated by his uncle.

Celestine on his death-bed had endeavoured to nominate his successor; he had offered to resign the papacy if the cardinals would elect John of Colonna. But, even if consistent with right and with usage, the words of dying sovereigns rarely take effect. Of twenty-eight cardinals, five only were absent; of the rest the unanimous vote fell on the youngest of their body, on the cardinal (Giovanni) Lothario. Lothario was only thirty-seven years old, almost an unprecedented age for a pope.[102] The cardinals who proclaimed him saluted him by the name of Innocent, in testimony of his blameless life. In his inauguration sermon broke forth the character of the man; the unmeasured assertion of his dignity, protestations of humility which have a sound of pride. “Ye see what manner of servant that is whom the Lord hath set over his people; no other than the vicegerent of Christ, the successor of Peter. He stands in the midst between God and man; below God, above man; less than God, more than man. He judges all, is judged by none, for it is written, ‘I will judge.’ But he whom the pre-eminence of dignity exalts is lowered by his office of a servant, that so humility may be exalted, and pride abased; for God is against the high-minded, and to the lowly he shows mercy; and he who exalteth himself shall be abased. Every valley shall be lifted up, every hill and mountain laid low!”

The letters in which he announced his election to the king of France, and to the other realms of Christendom, blend a decent but exaggerated humility with the consciousness of power; Innocent’s confidence in himself transpires through his confidence in the divine protection.

The state of Christendom might have tempted a less ambitious prelate to extend and consolidate his supremacy. Wherever Innocent cast his eyes over Christendom and beyond the limits of Christendom, appeared disorder, contested thrones, sovereigns oppressing their subjects, subjects in arms against their sovereigns, the ruin of the Christian cause. In Italy the crown of Naples on the brows of an infant; the fairest provinces under the galling yoke of fierce German adventurers; the Lombard republics, Guelf or Ghibelline, at war within their walls, at war or in implacable animosity against each other; the empire, distracted by rival claimants for the throne, one vast scene of battle, intrigue, almost of anarchy; the tyrannical and dissolute Philip Augustus king of France, before long the tyrannical and feeble John of England.

The Byzantine Empire is tottering to its fall; the kingdom of Jerusalem confined almost to the city of Acre. Every realm seems to demand, or at least to invite, the interposition, the mediation, of the head of Christendom; in every land one party at least, or one portion of society, would welcome his interference in the last resort for refuge or for protection.

Nor did Innocent shrink from that which might have crushed a less energetic spirit to despair; from the Jordan to the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean to beyond the Baltic, his influence is felt and confessed; his vast correspondence shows at once the inexhaustible activity of his mind; he is involved simultaneously or successively in the vital interests of every kingdom in the western world.[e]

THE AUTOCRACY OF INNOCENT III

In order to secure Sicily for her son, the empress Constantia, pressed hard by parties, was obliged to accept the papal investment under the new conditions prescribed by the pontiff. After Constantia’s death (the 27th of November, 1198) Innocent ruled over all Sicily in the character of guardian. Still further the disputed imperial election, by which Germany was divided between Philip, duke of Swabia, and Otto, duke of Saxony, encouraged the pope to a larger extension of his power. Immediately after his accession, Innocent had already taken the oath of fealty to the imperial præfectus urbis; now he dislodged the vassals of the empire from the territory of Matilda, and established in Tuscany a civic league.

[Sidenote: [1201-1216 A.D.]]

After he had thus consolidated his power in Italy, he commenced an energetic interference in German politics; for he forthwith claimed the right to decide on a disputed imperial election. He must naturally have been inclined rather to the Guelf than to the Hohenstaufen candidate, so maintaining his pretensions he actually decided (1201) in favour of Otto IV. However, he was resisted with great energy by Philip’s party, and the flame of discord only burned so much the brighter in Germany. As Philip continued to gain more decisive advantages over his enemy, Innocent began negotiations with him, which seemed fraught with danger to Otto. Meanwhile Philip was murdered by Otto of Wittelsbach in Bamberg (1208). Otto IV was then universally recognised as emperor, and after he had satisfied the pope’s demands in all points he was crowned by him. But so soon as Otto had reached this goal of his wishes, he began again to vindicate the imperial rights in Italy, and to overthrow the pope’s new creations, without suffering himself to be turned from his path by the sentence of excommunication and dethronement which the deluded Innocent pronounced against him in November, 1210. Now he himself encouraged the canvass of the only surviving Hohenstaufen. Frederick appeared in Germany in 1212, and, upheld as he was by the pope and the king of France, he quickly won most of all ranks to his side. On the 25th of July, 1215, he received the German king’s crown at Aachen, and Otto down to his death (1218) had to content himself with his ancestral territories in Brunswick.

UNIVERSAL SWAY OF THE POPE

On every side, the thunder of Rome broke over the heads of princes. A certain Swero is excommunicated for usurping the crown of Norway. A legate, in passing through Hungary, is detained by the king: Innocent writes in tolerably mild terms to this potentate, but fails not to intimate that he might be compelled to prevent his son’s accession to the throne. The king of Leon had married his cousin, a princess of Castile. Innocent subjects the kingdom to an interdict. When the clergy of Leon petition him to remove it, because when they ceased to perform their functions the laity paid no tithes and listened to heretical teachers when orthodox mouths were mute, he consented that divine service with closed doors, but not the rites of burial, might be performed. The king at length gave way, and sent back his wife.

But a more illustrious victory of the same kind was obtained over Philip Augustus, who, having repudiated Ingeborg of Denmark, had contracted another marriage. The conduct of the king, though not without the usual excuse of those times, nearness of blood, was justly condemned; and Innocent did not hesitate to visit his sins upon the people by a general interdict. This, after a short demur from some bishops, was enforced throughout France; the dead lay unburied, and the living were cut off from the offices of religion, till Philip, thus subdued, took back his divorced wife. The submission of such a prince, not feebly superstitious, like his predecessor Robert, nor vexed with seditions, like the emperor Henry IV, but brave, firm, and victorious, is perhaps the proudest trophy on the scutcheon of Rome.

Compared with this, the subsequent triumph of Innocent over the pusillanimous John seems cheaply gained, though the surrender of a powerful kingdom into the vassalage of the pope may strike us as a proof of stupendous baseness on one side and audacity on the other.

A disputed election furnished Innocent with an opportunity of thrusting forward the cardinal Stephen Langton into the archbishopric of Canterbury against the king’s will. When John resisted with anger, the pope laid England under an interdict, in 1208, and afterwards excommunicated the king; the latter sought by reckless cruelty to avenge himself on the clergy, and by severe oppression to make sure of his vassals. At last Innocent deposed him from his kingdom, and handed it over to the king of France. But while he was arming himself for the conquest, John, unable to trust his vassals, yielded in all points, and even received his kingdom in fee from the pope under circumstances of the greatest humiliation. Now was England yielded up to the discretion of an arbitrary pope and a contemptible king; this united the prelates and the barons to wrest Magna Charta from the king in 1215. In vain the pope with spiritual and the king with temporal weapons strove to effect its repeal; John’s death, however, in 1216, quickly put an end to internal discord.

Still greater prospects seemed to open themselves before the pope in Constantinople. Although the enthusiasm for crusades was already much diminished, nevertheless Innocent had succeeded, by unwearied efforts, in collecting a new army at Venice in 1202. The crafty doge, Enrico Dandolo, notwithstanding all papal admonitions, had first made use of the army for the reconquest of Zara (Jadera); it was then induced by the magnificent promises of a Greek prince, Alexius, to undertake an expedition against Constantinople; and when the reinstated emperor Isaac Angelus was unable to fulfil these promises, Constantinople was conquered, and a Latin empire established there, by the exaltation of Baldwin, count of Flanders, to the throne. Thus the church of Constantinople seemed now to be brought into subjection to the Roman see. However, even now, no one doubted the precariousness of this acquisition. For the new empire already contained the germ of dissolution; on the other hand it completely foiled the powerful enterprise in behalf of Palestine.

In the latter year of his life Innocent devoted especial attention to the Holy Land: King Frederick took the cross even at his coronation; and at the Lateran council of the year 1215, one of the most brilliant which had ever been held, the accomplishment of another crusade was one of the chief ends in view. The enthusiasm for the Holy Land was indeed by no means extinct; but in Germany the continuance of the twofold reign of Frederick and Otto led to many unfavourable opinions of the Roman see, which necessarily obstructed its readiness to undertake a fresh crusade.[k]

MILMAN’S ESTIMATE OF INNOCENT III

[Sidenote: [1198-1216 A.D.]]

In the full vigour of his manhood died Innocent III, 1216. He, of all the popes, had advanced the most exorbitant pretensions, and those pretensions had been received by an age most disposed to accept them with humble deference. The high and blameless, in some respects wise and gentle, character of Innocent might seem to approach more nearly than any one of the whole succession of Roman bishops to the ideal height of a supreme pontiff; in him, if ever, might appear to be realised the churchman’s highest conception of the vicar of Christ.

Gregory VII and Boniface VIII, the first and the last of the aggressive popes, and the aged Gregory IX, had no doubt more rugged warfare to encounter, fiercer and more unscrupulous enemies to subdue. But in all these there was a personal sternness, a contemptuous haughtiness; theirs was a worldly majesty. The pride of Innocent was calmer, more self-possessed; his dignity was less disturbed by degrading collisions with rude adversaries; he died on his unshaken throne, in the plenitude of his seemingly unquestioned power. Yet if we pause and contemplate, as we cannot but pause and contemplate, the issue of this highest, in a certain sense noblest and most religious contest for the papal ascendency over the world of man, there is an inevitable conviction of the unreality of that papal power. With all the grandeur of his views, with all the persevering energy of his measures, throughout Innocent’s reign, everywhere we behold failure, everywhere immediate discomfiture, or transitory success which paved the way for future disaster. The higher the throne of the pope the more manifestly were its foundations undermined, unsound, unenduring.

Even Rome does not always maintain her peaceful subservience. Her obedience is interrupted, precarious; that of transient awe, not of deep attachment, or rooted reverence. In the empire it is impossible not to burden the memory of Innocent with the miseries of the long civil war. Otto without the aid of the pope could not have maintained the contest for a year; with all the pope’s aid he had sunk into contempt, almost insignificance; he was about to be abandoned, if not actually abandoned, by the pope himself. The casual blow of the assassin alone prevented the complete triumph of Philip. Already he had extorted his absolution; Innocent was compelled to yield, and could not yield without loss of dignity. The triumph of Otto leads to as fierce, and more perilous resistance to the papal power than could have been expected from the haughtiness of the Hohenstaufen. The pope has an irresistible enemy in Italy itself. Innocent is compelled to abandon the great object of the papal policy, the breaking the line of succession in the house of Swabia, and to assist in the elevation of a Swabian emperor. He must yield to the union of the crown of Sicily with that of Germany, and so bequeath to his successors the obstinate and perilous strife with Frederick II.

In France, Philip Augustus is forced to seem, yet only seem, to submit; the miseries of his unhappy wife are but aggravated by the papal protection. The death of Agnes of Méran, rather than Innocent’s authority, heals the strife. The sons of the proscribed concubine succeed to the throne of France.

In England the barons refuse to desert John when under the interdict of the pope; when the pope becomes the king’s ally, resenting the cession of the realm, they withdraw their allegiance. Even in Stephen Langton, who owes his promotion to the pope, the Englishman prevails over the ecclesiastic; the Great Charter is extorted from the king when under the express protection of the holy see, and maintained resolutely against the papal sentence of abrogation; and in the Great Charter is laid the first stone of the religious as well as the civil liberties of the land.

Venice, in the crusade, deludes, defies, baffles the pope. The crusaders become her army, besiege, fight, conquer for her interests. In vain the pope protests, threatens, anathematises; Venice calmly proceeds in the subjugation of Zara. To the astonishment, the indignation of the pope, the crusaders’ banners wave not over Jerusalem, but over Constantinople. But for her own wisdom, Venice might have given an emperor to the capital of the East; she secures the patriarchate almost in defiance of the pope; only when she has entirely gained her ends does she submit to the petty and unregarded vengeance of the pope.

Even in the Albigensian war the success was indeed complete; heresy was crushed, but by means of which Innocent disapproved in his heart. He had let loose a terrible force, which he could neither arrest nor control. The pope can do everything but show mercy or moderation. He could not shake off, the papacy has never shaken off, the burden of its complicity in the remorseless carnage perpetrated by the crusaders in Languedoc, in the crimes and cruelties of Simon de Montfort. A dark and ineffaceable stain of fraud and dissimulation too has gathered around the fame of Innocent himself.[103] Heresy was quenched in blood; but the earth sooner or later gives out the terrible cry of blood for vengeance against murderers and oppressors.

The great religious event of this pontificate, the foundation of the Mendicant orders, that which perhaps perpetuated, or at least immeasurably strengthened, the papal power for two centuries, was extorted from the reluctant pope. Both St. Dominic and St. Francis were coldly received, almost contemptuously repelled. It was not till either his own more mature deliberation or wiser counsel, which took the form of divine admonition, prevented this fatal error and prophetically revealed the secret of their strength and of their irresistible influence throughout Christendom, that Innocent awoke to wisdom. He then bequeathed these two great standing armies to the papacy; armies maintained without cost, sworn, more than sworn, bound by the unbroken chains of their own zeal and devotion to unquestioning, unhesitating service throughout Christendom, speaking all languages. They were colonies of religious militia, natives of every land, yet under foreign control and guidance. Their whole power, importance, perhaps possessions rested on their fidelity to the see of Rome, that fidelity guaranteed by the charter of their existence. Well might they appear so great as they are seen by the eye of Dante, like the cherubim and seraphim in paradise.[e]

FREDERICK II AT WAR WITH THE PAPACY

[Sidenote: [1216-1244 A.D.]]

Honorius III, previously called Cencio Savelli, who succeeded Innocent, 1216, and governed the Roman church more than ten years, did not perform so many deeds worthy of being recorded; yet he was very careful that the Romish power should receive no diminution. Pursuing this course, he had a grievous falling out with the emperor Frederick II, a magnanimous prince, whom he himself had crowned at Rome in the year 1220. Frederick, imitating his grandfather, laboured to establish and enlarge the authority of the emperors in Italy, to depress the minor states and republics of Lombardy, and to diminish the immense wealth and power of the pontiffs and the bishops; and to accomplish these objects, he continually deferred the crusade, which he had promised with an oath. Honorius, on the other hand, continually urged Frederick to enter on his expedition to Palestine; yet he secretly encouraged, animated, and supported the cities and republics that resisted the emperor, and raised various impediments to the latter’s increasing power. Still, this hostility did not, at present, break out in open war.

But under Gregory IX--whose former name was Ugolino, and who was elevated from the bishopric of Ostia to the pontificate, 1227, an old man, but still bold and resolute--the fire, which had been long burning in secret, burst into a flame.[104] In the year 1227 the pontiff excommunicated the emperor, who still deferred his expedition to Palestine; but without proceeding in due form of ecclesiastical law, and without regarding the emperor’s excuse of ill health. In the year 1228 the emperor sailed with his fleet to Palestine; but instead of waging war as he was bound to do, he made a truce with Saladin on recovering Jerusalem. While he was absent the pontiff raised war against him in Apulia, and endeavoured to excite all Europe to oppose him. Therefore Frederick hastened back, in the year 1229, and after vanquishing his enemies, made his peace with the pontiff in the year 1230. But this peace could not be durable, as Frederick would not submit to the control of the pontiff. Therefore, as the emperor continued to press heavily on the republics of Lombardy, which were friendly to the pontiff, and transferred Sardinia, which the pontiff claimed as part of the patrimony of the church, to his son Enzio; and wished to withdraw Rome itself from the power of the pontiff; and did other things very offensive to Gregory--the pontiff, in the year 1239, again laid him under anathemas; and accused him to all the sovereigns of Europe of many crimes and enormities, and particularly of speaking contemptuously of the Christian religion.

The emperor, on the other hand, avenged the injuries that he received, both by written publications and by his military operations in Italy, in which he was for the most part successful; and thus he defended his reputation, and also brought the pontiff into perplexity and difficulty. To rescue himself, in some measure, in the year 1240 Gregory summoned a general council to meet at Rome, intending to hurl the emperor from his throne by the united suffrages of the assembled fathers. But Frederick, in the year 1241, captured the Genoese fleet, which was carrying a great part of the fathers to the council at Rome, and seizing as well their treasures as themselves, he cast them into prison. Broken down by these calamities, and by others of no less magnitude, Gregory shortly after sank into the grave.

The successor of Gregory, Goffredo Castiglione of Milan, who assumed the name of Celestine IV, died before his consecration; and after a long interregnum, in the year 1243, Senibaldi, a Genoese, descended from the counts Fieschi, succeeded under the pontifical name of Innocent IV, a man inferior to none of his predecessors in arrogance and insolence of temper. Between him and Frederick there were at first negotiations for peace; but the terms insisted on by the pontiff were deemed too harsh by the emperor. Hence Innocent, feeling himself unsafe in any part of Italy, in 1244 removed from Genoa to Lyons in France; and the next year assembled a council there, in the presence of which, but without its approbation (whatever the Roman writers may affirm to the contrary), he declared Frederick unworthy of the imperial throne.

[Sidenote: [1244-1274 A.D.]]

This most unrighteous decision of the pontiff had such influence upon the German princes, who were infected with the superstition of the times, that they elected first Henry, landgraf of Thuringia, and on his death William, count of Holland, to the imperial throne. Frederick continued the war vigorously and courageously in Italy, and with various successes, until a dysentery terminated his life in Apulia, on the 13th of December, 1250. On the death of his foe, Innocent returned to Italy in the year 1251. From this time especially (though their origin was much earlier) the two noted factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines, of which the former sided with the pontiffs and the latter with the emperors, most unhappily rent asunder and devastated all Italy.

Alexander IV, whose name as count of Segni and bishop of Ostia was Rinaldo, became pontiff on the death of Innocent (1254) and reigned six years and six months. Excepting some efforts to put down a grandson of Frederick II, called Conradin, and to quiet the perpetual commotions of Italy, he busied himself more in regulating the internal affairs of the church than in national concerns. The mendicant friars, Dominicans and Franciscans, are under especial obligations to him. Urban IV, before his election to the pontificate in 1261, was James, patriarch of Jerusalem, a man born of obscure parentage at Troyes. He distinguished himself more by instituting the festival of the Body of Christ than by any other achievement. He indeed formed many projects: but he executed few of them, being prevented by death, in the year 1264, after a short reign of three years. Not much longer was the reign of Clement IV, a Frenchman and bishop of Sabina, under the name of Guido Fulcodi (Guy Foulques), who was created pontiff in the year 1265. Yet he is better known on several accounts, but especially for conferring the kingdom of Naples on Charles of Anjou, brother to Louis IX, the king of France. Charles is well known to have beheaded Conradin, the only surviving grandson of Frederick II, after conquering him in battle, and this, if not by the counsel, at least with the consent of the pontiff.[105]

On the death of Clement IV[106] there were vehement contests among the cardinals, respecting the election of a new pontiff; which continued till the third year, when, at last, 1271, Teobaldo of Piacenza, archdeacon of Liège, was chosen, and assumed the name of Gregory X. He had been called from Palestine, where he had resided; and having witnessed the depressed state of the Christians in the Holy Land, nothing more engaged his thoughts than sending them succour.

COUNCIL AT LYONS

[Sidenote: [1274-1294 A.D.]]

Accordingly, as soon as he was consecrated, he appointed a council to be held at Lyons in France, and attended it in person in the month of May, 1274. The principal subjects discussed were the re-establishment of the Christian dominion in the East, and the reunion of the Greek and Latin churches. This has commonly been reckoned the fourteenth general council, and is particularly noticeable for the new regulations it established for the election of Roman pontiffs, and the celebrated provision which is still in force requiring the cardinal electors to be shut up in conclave. Neither did the pontiff, though of a milder disposition than many others, hesitate to repeat and inculcate that odious maxim of Gregory VII, that the pontiff is supreme lord of the world, and especially of the Roman Empire. For in the year 1271 he sent a menacing letter to the princes of Germany, admonishing them to elect an emperor, and without regarding the wishes or the claims of Alfonso, king of Castile; otherwise he would appoint a head of the empire himself. Accordingly, the princes assembled, and elected Rudolf I, of the house of Habsburg.

Gregory X died in the year 1276, and his three immediate successors were all chosen and died in the same year. Innocent V, previously Pietro di Tarantaisia, was a Dominican monk, and bishop of Ostia. Adrian V was a Genoese, named Ottoboni, and cardinal of St. Adrian. John XXI, previously Pedro, bishop of Tusculum, was a native of Portugal. The next pontiff, who came to the chair in 1277, reigned longer. He was Giovanni Gaetano, of the family of Ursini, a Roman, and cardinal of St. Nicholas, who assumed the title of Nicholas III. He greatly enlarged what is called the patrimony of St. Peter; and, as his actions show, had formed other great projects, which he would undoubtedly have accomplished, as he was a man of energy and enterprise, had he not prematurely died in the year 1280.

His successor, Martin IV, elected by the cardinals in 1281, was a French nobleman, Simon de Brion, a man of equal boldness and energy of character with Nicholas. For he excommunicated Michael Palæologus, the Greek emperor, because he had violated the compact of union with the Latins, which was settled at the Council of Lyons. Pedro of Aragon he deprived of his kingdoms and of all his property, because he had seized upon Sicily; and he bestowed them gratuitously on Charles, son to the king of France. He was projecting many other things, consonant with the views of the pontiffs, when he was suddenly overtaken by death in 1285. His plans were prosecuted by his successor, Giacomo Savelli, who was elected in 1285 and took the name of Honorius IV. But a distressing disease in his joints, of which he died in 1287, prevented him from attempting anything further. Nicholas IV, previously Girolamo d’Ascoli, bishop of Palestrina, who attained to the pontifical chair in 1288, and died in 1292, was able to attend to the affairs both of the church and of the nations with more diligence and care. Hence he is represented in history sometimes as the arbiter in the disputes of sovereign princes, sometimes as the strenuous asserter of the rights and prerogatives of the church, and again as the assiduous promoter of missionary labours among the Tatars and other nations of the East. But nothing lay nearer his heart than the restoration of the dominion of the Christians in Palestine, where their cause was nearly ruined. In this he laboured strenuously indeed, but in vain; for death intercepted all his projects.

After his death the church was without a head till the third year, the cardinals disagreeing exceedingly among themselves. At length, on the 5th of July, 1294, they unanimously chose an aged man, greatly venerated for his sanctity--Pietro, surnamed di Murrhone, from a mountain in which he led a solitary and very austere life; he assumed the pontifical name of Celestine V. But as the austerity of his life tacitly censured the corrupt morals of the Romish court, and especially of the cardinals, and as he showed very plainly that he was more solicitous to advance the holiness of the church than its worldly grandeur, he was soon considered as unworthy of the office which he had reluctantly assumed. Hence some of the cardinals, and especially Benedict Cajetan, persuaded him very easily to abdicate the chair, in the fourth month of his pontificate. He died, 1296, in the castle of Fumone, where his successor detained him a captive, lest he should make some disturbance. But afterwards Clement V enrolled him in the calendar of the saints. To him the sect of Benedictine monks who were called, after him, Celestines, owed its origin; a sect still existing in Italy and France, though now nearly extinct, and differing from the other Benedictines by their more rigid rules of life.

ACCESSION OF BONIFACE VIII

[Sidenote: [1294-1301 A.D.]]

He was succeeded in 1294 by Benedict, Cardinal Cajetan, by whose persuasions he had been chiefly led to resign the pontificate, and who now assumed the name of Boniface VIII. This was a man formed to produce disturbance both in church and state, and eager for confirming and enlarging the power of the pontiffs, to the highest degree of rashness. From his first entrance on the office he arrogated to himself sovereign power over all things sacred and secular; overawed kings and states by his fulminations; decided important controversies at his will; enlarged the code of canon law by new accessions, namely, by the sixth book of Decretals; made war, among others, particularly on the noble family of Colonna, which had opposed his election--in a word, he seemed to be another Gregory VII at the head of the church. At the close of the century, he established the year of jubilee, which is still solemnised at Rome.

That the governors of the church, as well of highest rank as of inferior, were addicted to all those vices which are the most unbecoming to men in their stations, is testified most abundantly. As for the Greek and oriental clergy, many of whom lived under oppressive governments, we shall say nothing; although their faults are sufficiently manifest. But of the faults of the Latins silence would be the less proper, in proportion to the certainty that from this source the whole community was involved in the greatest calamities. All the honest and good men of that age ardently wished for a reformation of the church, both in its head and in its members, as they themselves expressed it. But to so desirable an event there were still many obstacles. First, the power of the pontiffs was so confirmed by its long continuance that it seemed to be immovably established. In the next place, extravagant superstition held the minds of the majority of the people in abject slavery. And lastly, the ignorance and barbarism of the times quickly extinguished the sparks of truth that appeared from time to time. Yet the dominion of the Roman pontiffs, impregnable and durable as it seemed to be, was gradually undermined and weakened in this century, partly by the rash insolence of the pontiffs themselves and partly by the occurrence of certain unexpected events.

PHILIP THE FAIR OVERPOWERS THE PAPACY

[Sidenote: [1301-1305 A.D.]]

The commencement of this important change must be referred to the contest between Boniface VIII, who governed the Latin church at the beginning of this century, and Philip the Fair, king of France. This high-minded sovereign first taught the Europeans what the emperors had in vain attempted--that the Roman bishops could be vanquished, and be laid under restraint. In a very haughty letter addressed to Philip, Boniface maintained that all kings and persons whatever, and the king of France as well as others, by divine command, owed perfect obedience to the Roman pontiff, and this not merely in religious matters, but likewise in secular and human affairs. The king replied with extreme bitterness. The pontiff repeated his former assertions with greater arrogance, and published the celebrated bull called Unam sanctam; in which he asserted that Jesus Christ had granted a twofold power or sword to his church, a spiritual and a temporal; that the whole human race was subjected to the pontiff; and that all who dissented from this doctrine were heretics, and could not expect to be saved. The king, on the contrary, in an assembly of his nobles, in 1303, through the famous lawyer, Guillaume de Nogaret, publicly accused the pontiff of heresy, simony, dishonesty, and other enormities; and urged the calling of a general council to depose from his office a pontiff so very wicked. The pontiff, in return, excommunicated the king and all his adherents the same year.

Soon after receiving this sentence, Philip again, in an assembly of the states of his kingdom, entered a formal complaint against the pontiff, by men of the highest reputation and influence; and appealed to the decision of a future general council of the church. He then despatched Guillaume de Nogaret, with some others, into Italy, to rouse the people to insurrection, and to bring the pontiff prisoner to Lyons, where he wished the council to be held. Nogaret, who was a resolute and energetic man, having drawn over to his interest the Colonna family, which was at variance with the pontiff, raised a small force, suddenly attacked Boniface, who was living securely at Anagni, made him prisoner, wounded him, and, among other severe indignities, struck him on the head with his iron gauntlet. The people of Anagni, indeed, rescued the pontiff from the hands of his furious enemy; but he died shortly after, at Rome, in the month of October, from rage and anguish of mind.

Benedict XI, previously Nicolo of Trevigio, the successor of Boniface, profiting by his example, restored the king of France and his kingdom to their former honours and privileges, without even being solicited; but he was unwilling to absolve from his crime Nogaret, who had so grievously offended against the pontifical dignity. This daring man, therefore, prosecuted strenuously the suit commenced against Boniface in the Romish court; and, in the name of the king, demanded that a mark of infamy should be set upon the deceased pontiff.

Benedict XI died in the year 1304; and Philip, by his secret machinations, caused Bertrand d’Agoust, a Frenchman, and archbishop of Bordeaux, to be created pontiff at Rome, on the 5th of June, 1305. For the contest of the king against the pontiffs was not yet wholly settled, Nogaret not being absolved, and it might easily break out again. Besides, the king thirsted for revenge, and designed to extort from the court of Rome a condemnation of Boniface; he also meditated the destruction of the Templars, and other matters of great importance which he could hardly expect from an Italian pontiff. He therefore wished to have a French pontiff, whom he could control according to his pleasure, and who would be in a degree dependent on him. The new pontiff, who took the name of Clement V, remained in France, as the king wished, and transferred the pontifical court to Avignon, where it continued for seventy years. This period the Italians call the Babylonian Captivity.[n]

HALLAM ON THE CLIMAX OF PAPAL POWER

[Sidenote: [1198-1305 A.D.]]

The noonday of papal dominion extends from the pontificate of Innocent III inclusively to that of Boniface VIII; or, in other words, through the thirteenth century. Rome inspired during this age all the terror of her ancient name. She was once more the mistress of the world, and kings were her vassals. In her long contention with the house of Swabia, she finally triumphed. After his deposition by the Council of Lyons, the affairs of Frederick II went rapidly into decay. With every allowance for the enmity of the Lombards and the jealousies of Germany, it must be confessed, that his proscription by Innocent IV and Alexander IV was the main cause of the ruin of his family.

This general supremacy effected by the Roman church over mankind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, derived material support from the promulgation of the canon law. By means of her new jurisprudence Rome acquired in every country a powerful body of advocates who, though many of them were laymen, would, with the usual bigotry of lawyers, defend every pretension or abuse, to which their received standard of authority gave sanction.

Next to the canon law, we should reckon the institution of the mendicant orders among those circumstances which principally contributed to the aggrandisement of Rome. By the acquisition, and in some respects the enjoyment, or at least ostentation of immense riches, the ancient monastic orders had forfeited much of the public esteem. No means appeared so efficacious to counteract this effect as the institution of religious societies, strictly debarred from the insidious temptations of wealth. These new preachers were received with astonishing approbation by the laity, whose religious zeal usually depends a good deal upon their opinion of sincerity and disinterestedness in their pastors. And the progress of the Dominican and Franciscan friars in the thirteenth century bears a remarkable analogy to that of the English Methodists. Aware of the powerful support they might receive in turn, the pontiffs of the thirteenth century accumulated benefits upon the disciples of Francis and Dominic. They were exempted from episcopal authority; they were permitted to preach or hear confessions without leave of the ordinary, to accept of legacies, and to inter in their churches. It was naturally to be expected that the objects of such extensive favours would repay their benefactors by a more than usual obsequiousness and alacrity in their service. Accordingly, the Dominicans and Franciscans vied with each other in magnifying the papal supremacy.

We should not overlook, among the causes that contributed to the dominion of the popes, their prerogative of dispensing with ecclesiastical ordinances. The most remarkable exercise of this was as to the canonical impediments of matrimony. Such strictness as is prescribed by the Christian religion with respect to divorce was very unpalatable to the barbarous nations. They in fact paid it little regard; under the Merovingian dynasty, even private men put away their wives at pleasure. In many capitularies of Charlemagne, we find evidence of the prevailing license of repudiation and even polygamy. The principles which the church inculcated were in appearance the very reverse of this laxity; yet they led indirectly to the same effect. Marriages were forbidden, not merely within the limits which nature, or those inveterate associations which we call nature, have rendered sacred, but as far as the seventh degree of collateral consanguinity, computed from a common ancestor. Not only was affinity, or relationship by marriage, put upon the same footing as that by blood; but a fantastical connection, called spiritual affinity, was invented in order to prohibit marriage between a sponsor and godchild. A union, however innocently contracted, between parties thus circumstanced, might at any time be dissolved, and their subsequent cohabitation forbidden. Innocent III laid down as a maxim that out of the plenitude of his power he might lawfully dispense with the law; and accordingly granted, among other instances of this prerogative, dispensations from impediments of marriage to the emperor Otto IV. Similar indulgences were given by his successors, though they did not become usual for some ages. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 removed a great part of the restraint by permitting marriages beyond the fourth degree, or what we call third cousins; and dispensations had been made more easy when it was discovered that they might be converted into a source of profit. They served a more important purpose by rendering it necessary for the princes of Europe, who seldom could marry into one another’s houses without transgressing the canonical limits, to keep on good terms with the court of Rome, which, in several instances that have been mentioned, fulminated its censures against sovereigns who lived without permission in what was considered an incestuous union.

The dispensing power of the popes was exerted in several cases of a temporal nature, particularly in the legitimation of children for purposes even of succession. This Innocent III claimed as an indirect consequence of his right to remove the canonical impediment which bastardy offered to ordination; since it would be monstrous, he says, that one who is legitimate for spiritual functions should continue otherwise in any civil matter. But the most important and mischievous species of dispensations was from the observance of promissory oaths. Two principles are laid down in the Decretals--that an oath disadvantageous to the church is not binding; and that one extorted by force was of slight obligation, and might be annulled by ecclesiastical authority. As the first of these maxims gave the most unlimited privilege to the popes of breaking all faith of treaties which thwarted their interest or passion, a privilege which they continually exercised, so the second was equally convenient to princes, weary of observing engagements towards their subjects or their neighbours.

It must appear to every careful inquirer that the papal authority, though manifesting outwardly more show of strength every year, had been secretly undermined and lost a great deal of its hold upon public opinion, before the accession of Boniface VIII, in 1294, to the pontifical throne. The clergy were rendered sullen by demands of money, invasions of the legal right of patronage, and unreasonable partiality to the mendicant orders; a part of the mendicants themselves had begun to declaim against the corruptions of the papal court; while the laity, subjects alike and sovereigns, looked upon both the head and the members of the hierarchy with jealousy and dislike. Boniface, full of inordinate arrogance and ambition, and not sufficiently sensible of this gradual change in human opinion, endeavoured to strain to a higher pitch the despotic pretensions of former pontiffs. As Gregory VII appears the most usurping of mankind till we read the history of Innocent III, so Innocent III is thrown into shade by the superior audacity of Boniface VIII. But independently of the less favourable dispositions of the public, he wanted the most essential quality for an ambitious pope--reputation for integrity.

The sensible decline of the papacy is to be dated from the pontificate of Boniface VIII, who had strained its authority to a higher pitch than any of his predecessors. There is a spell wrought by uninterrupted good fortune, which captivates men’s understanding, and persuades them, against reasoning and analogy, that violent power is immortal and irresistible. The spell is broken by the first change of success. In tracing the papal empire over mankind, we have no marked and definite crisis of revolution. But slowly, like the retreat of waters or the stealthy pace of old age, that extraordinary power over human opinion has been subsiding for five centuries. As the retrocession of the Roman terminus under Adrian gave the first overt proof of decline in the ambitious energies of that empire, so the tacit submission of the successors of Boniface VIII to the king of France might have been hailed by Europe as a token that their influence was beginning to abate. Imprisoned, insulted, deprived eventually of life by the violence of Philip, a prince excommunicated, and who had gone all lengths in defying and despising the papal jurisdiction, Boniface had every claim to be avenged by the inheritors of the same spiritual dominion. When Benedict XI rescinded the bulls of his predecessor, and admitted Philip the Fair to communion without insisting on any concessions, he acted perhaps prudently, but gave a fatal blow to the temporal authority of Rome.[l]

FOOTNOTES

[92] [In the enforcement of celibacy, the emperors and a large part of the laity were not unwilling to join. But when Gregory declared it a sin for the ecclesiastic to receive his benefice under conditions from a layman, he aimed a deadly blow at all secular authority.[g]]

[93] Floto (II, pp. 45 et seqq.) has well shown the terrible workings of this appeal to the populace. The peasants held that an accusation of simony or marriage exempted them from the payment of tithe.

[94] [“Calixtus,” says Milman,[e] “though by no means the first Frenchman, was the first French pontiff who established that close connection between France and the papacy which had such important influence on the affairs of the church and of Europe.”]

[95] [He was tied backwards on a camel and carried in the triumphal procession of Calixtus, who had just previously excommunicated the emperor. It was in his pontificate that the Concordat of Worms took place as described previously.]

[96] [His name was Nicholas Breakspeare, and he was the only Englishman who ever filled the papal chair.]

[97] [Under him Arnold of Brescia was robbed of his popularity and forced into exile. He was captured by officers of Barbarossa and turned over to the pope, who had him executed and his ashes cast into the Tiber. Of him Milman[e] says: “Arnold of Brescia had struck boldly at both powers; he utterly annulled the temporal supremacy of the pope; and if he acknowledged, reduced the sovereignty of the emperor to a barren title.”]

[98] [Or rather, from his feet, according to Roger of Hoveden’s[h] doubtful chronicle, which represents the pope as seated with his feet on the crown and spurning it with a kick toward the kneeling emperor.]

[99] [Reichel[b] calls him “Greatest without exception among the great popes of the Middle Ages.”]

[100] It may be well to state the chief points which the pope claimed as his exclusive prerogative: (1) General supremacy of jurisdiction, a claim, it is obvious, absolutely illimitable; (2) Right of legislation, including the summoning and presiding in councils; (3) Judgment in all ecclesiastic causes arduous and difficult. This included the power of judging on contested elections, and degrading bishops, a super-metropolitan power; (4) Right of confirmation of bishops and metropolitans, the gift of the pallium. Hence, by degrees, rights of appointment to devolved sees, reservations, etc.; (5) Dispensations; (6) The foundation of new orders; (7) Canonisation. Compare Eichhorn, II, p. 500.

[101] The Conti family boasted of nine popes--among them Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, Innocent XIII; of thirteen cardinals, according to Ciacconius.[j]

[102] Walter von der Vogelweide, who attributes all the misery of the civil war in Germany to Innocent, closes his poem with these words (modernised by K. Simrock):

“Ich hörte fern in einer Klaus Ein Jammern ohne Ende: Ein Klausner rang die Hände; Er klagte Gott sein bittres Leid; O weh, der Papst ist allzu jung, Herr Gott, hilf deiner Christenheit.”

[103] It is remarkable that Innocent III was never canonised. There were popular rumours that the soul of Innocent, escaping from the fires of purgatory, appeared on earth, scourged by pursuing devils, taking refuge at the foot of the cross, and imploring the prayers of the faithful.

[104] Milman[e] says: “The empire and the papacy were now to meet in their last mortal and implacable strife. Cæsar would bear no superior, the successor of St. Peter no equal.”

[105] [“With Conradin’s death,” says Mullinger,[d] “the long contest of the empire with the popedom came to an end.”]

[106] [Of Clement IV, Milman[e] says: “It is his praise that he did not exalt his kindred, that he left in obscurity the husbands of his daughters. But the wonder betrayed by this praise shows at once how Christendom had been offended; it was prophetic of the stronger offence which nepotism would hereafter entail upon the papal see.”]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us